A Left Depoliticization?: Wassily Leontief and the Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning in the 1970s

• In Event: A History of Anti-Neoliberalism: US Developmentalism, and Neoliberalism Reconsidered 1970-2005

Abstract

Histories of the crises of American capitalism in the 1970s often implicitly or explicitly imply a centrifugal tendency towards social and cultural “fracturing” during the decade. This framing lends itself to an interpretation of the neoliberal transition as a profound rupture in the terms and methods of economic policy—epitomized by a turn to deregulation, privatization and market mechanisms. Yet, for some, the crises of the 1970s provoked the opposite tendency—a move to more consciously direct economic life, to stabilize prices, and to establish a more robust and visible role for the state in directing investment. In short, the decade also saw a strong and surprisingly widespread integrative tendency.

This paper explores one notable instance of this phenomenon: the national economic planning movement in the U.S. in the 1970s. Spearheaded by the idiosyncratic economist Wassily Leontief and president of the UAW Leonard Woodcock, planning brought together union leaders, heterodox economists, civil rights activists, and a small cluster of businessmen. Often cast as the last gasp of a spent Keynesian New Deal politics, this paper suggests that planning in fact offered a novel analysis of postwar American political-economy which cut across prevailing economic ideologies. Critical of an exclusive emphasis on macroeconomic monetary and fiscal policy, planners saw microeconomic sectoral policy as crucial to a resolution of the economic difficulties of the decade. In surprising ways, planners shared neoliberal and neoconservative preoccupations about the link between inflation and growing democratic demands on the economic system. Yet, where neoliberal economists sought to insulate markets from political contestation, planners aimed to construct an architecture in which representative elites—from labor, business, and government—might bargain over the direction and priorities of economic life, aided in part by innovations in economic forecasting. The legislative agenda attached to national economic planning largely failed, yet their methods and analysis found echoes in debates over industrial policy in the 1980s and beyond. This history can, therefore, offer some lessons for our understanding of the relationship between economic technocracy and democracy in a later period, and help us grasp some features that are especially salient about a neoliberal political-economy.

Author

• Rohan Shah, New York University