Institutionalism in Action: Balancing the Substantive Imbalances of “the Economy” through the Veil of Money
重新梳理了国民收入核算的起源，指出它并非自然源于凯恩斯主义，而是由制度主义经济学家在两次世界大战期间为管理商业周期而开发的知识基础设施，通过货币面纱将异质性经济要素整合为可干预的统计对象。
Scholars working on the history of economics and economic governance assume national income accounting emerged naturally out of Keynesian concerns with economic growth and wartime needs. This paper provides an alternative and more complex genealogy, arguing instead that income accounting was born out of a governmental project, implemented by institutionalist economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) during the interwar period, to manage “the business cycle.” Bridging the literatures on the history of economic policymaking of the interwar period and the postwar triumph of “American Keynesianism,” it shows that institutionalists developed income accounting as a knowledge infrastructure to monitor inter-sectoral imbalances that generated cyclical fluctuations. Called the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) System, this infrastructure constructed “the economy” as a composite statistical object, composed of many disparate, nonfungible substantive elements that could not have been otherwise patched into a coherent whole. Wrapping these elements into the veil of money, the NIPA System became the interface through which policymakers intervened in intersectoral imbalances at the level of monetary flows with fiscal tools.