The economy is opaque. Neither the marginalist revolution at the end of the nineteenth century nor the rise of neoclassical economics in postwar social science managed to alter this reality. Scholars of capitalism have shown that it is this opacity which shapes how actors operate within markets—insurance and risk management, information asymmetry and profits, and the competitive advantage of firms all emerge out of uncertainty. Since political and economic advantages accrue to those who see the furthest into the fog, financial traders, economic theorists, and state bureaucrats have often been united in the goal of getting a clearer view.

This panel explores such attempts at making the economy visible. Recent historical work has demonstrated how efforts to measure the economy have often been motivated by new desires to manage it. However, less attention has been paid to the ways that such measurements define the very object under study. It is telling that the modern usage of “the economy” did not enter our vocabulary until the first official national income estimates were prepared in the 1930s, and topics such as “finance” evolved concomitant with the mathematical models that made their object of study legible in the late 1950s. Rather than view measurement solely through the lens of management, the talks in this panel examine how such efforts were also projects to define what the economy was. Challenging the intellectual hegemony of the “neoclassical” picture of the economy, these panelists explore how natural scientists, social scientists, and political authorities across Latin America, Europe, and the United States sought to understand what the economy was by making it visible.

The papers proceed from the core of economics outward to the periphery of the discipline. The first paper explores the role mathematics and metaphors played in the dual macroeconomic revolution of John Maynard Keynes and Simon Kuznets in the 1930s. Tracing these strands of economic thought from the experimental years of the Great Depression to their postwar dominance sheds new light on economists’ efforts to “get a better picture” of the economy, an object which they constructed through their efforts to visualize it. The second paper explores research on the informal sector at Latin American universities, think tanks, and the International Labor Organization (ILO). This paper examines how realms of economic activity dubbed "shadowy" and "arcane" were used to challenge the authority of statisticians and development economists. The third paper studies how economists at the Santa Fe Institute turned to solid-state physics to make visible “complexity” in the economy. By turning to physics, these collaborators collapsed a distinction between natural and social systems, expanded the domain of “economic behavior” to encompass topics from ecology to human psychology.

Together, these papers examine how efforts to “see” the economy were also attempts to define what “the economy” even was. The comments, provided by a historian of 20^th century economic and social thought, will bring these papers into conversation, and pose the question: what is the economy and how should historians study it?