The Chicago Boys and the Making of Disciplines

After 1945, universities across Latin America established free-standing economics programs where virtually none had existed before. Today, the best-documented conflicts within and around fledgling economics departments are doctrinal disputes between established schools of thought.  But until 1970, those debates existed alongside, and were often secondary to, more foundational conflicts over the definition and purpose of economics itself.  What was an economic question?  Who could call himself an economist?  What did economists do, and in what realms of life could they exercise authority?  These disputes, characteristic of professions in creation, deserve wider attention.

This paper uses the history of the Chicago School in Latin America to show how disciplines came into existence.  Chile is today the best-known site of US university assistance in Latin America, a place where Chicago-educated economists became advisors to the Pinochet dictatorship and launched a radical liberalization program.  But until Pinochet seized power, the Chicago Boys were a marginal group of professors who occasionally accepted teaching positions abroad.  Their major deployment was to Colombia’s Universidad del Valle from 1963 to 1968.  Within historians’ usual frame, their trip was inconsequential, generating no pronounced ideological conflicts or new national policies.  They taught a few hundred students who became provincial elites, and the economics faculty they shaped was short-lived.

But they have a legacy in Colombian higher education: the business school.  The major conflict surrounding the Chicago Boys in Colombia was an effort to distinguish economics from business administration. That division took decades to formalize, and depended on the Universidad del Valle, which in 1964 created Colombia’s first MBA program.  This paper examines Chicago’s role in the formation of business education, the troublesome problem of establishing boundaries and relationships between disciplines, and the national and international consequences of Colombia’s solution for the professionalization of economists and managers in the Americas.