Developing Economics: Inflation and Economic Knowledge in Argentina

• In Event: La ‘clase media’ and urban life in Buenos Aires: knowledge, critique, belonging

Abstract

This paper examines recent debates surrounding inflation in Argentina to illustrate how economic theories are being placed under public scrutiny and remade as objects of public concern in Latin America. While ethnographic engagements with finance have provided valuable insights into the moral, theoretical, and legal infrastructures of economic worlds, state efforts to cope with the effects of finance have not been the focus of concerted ethnographic attention. Until recently, most Latin American policymakers accepted explanations of inflation that were grounded in monetarist, neoclassical economic theory — the brand of theory that had been famously and forcefully imported to the region through the intervention of US-trained economists like the Chicago Boys (and later the IMF). But in the past decade, as part of a widely-noted turn to the left in the region, heterodox economists have gained an increasing voice in countries such as Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela. These economists, whose work challenges some basic tenets of the “orthodox” neoclassical tradition, are working to forge new economic theories grounded in the Global South as part of broader efforts to find alternatives to neoliberalism in Latin America. By following debates about the measurement, nature, and causes of inflation, this paper tracks economic theory through the various theaters of its production and circulation in order to rethink the production of economic imaginaries in contemporary Latin America.

Author

• Nicholas J Davella, The Cooper Union