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Embedding Groupthink: Assessing the Rise and Influence of Neoliberal Economics View project
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Abstract
Neoliberal economics has reshaped societies. How did this doctrine ascend? While
existing explanations emphasize a variety of factors, one neglected aspect is
intellectual rivalry within the US economics profession. Neoliberalism had to attain
prestige against the grain of the intelligentsia prior to becoming a force to organize
political power. Using qualitative and quantitative evidence, we examine key rivals
in US economics from 1960 to 1985: the Chicago School of Economics, neoliberal
pioneers and the ‘Charles River Group’ (Harvard University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology), the mainstream Keynesian stronghold. We identify sociali-
zation mechanisms from historical accounts, which suggest forms of social cohe-
sion between elite professors and their students. We measure social cohesion and
network structure from salient relations within and between generations, using a
new a dataset focused on elite economics professors and their graduate students.
What differentiated the Chicago School from Charles River was its fostering of social
cohesion and its effective transmission of value orientations across generations.
1. Introduction
The ascendance of neoliberal economic thought is one of the most wide-reaching intellectual
trends of the last half-century. From a relatively marginal and radical position in the 1950s
C The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
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2 L. F. Henriksen et al.
and 1960s, neoliberal economics became the prevailing operational ideology not just of the
economics discipline but of much economic policy by the mid-1980s (Kogut and
MacPherson, 2011). The common sense of economic theory and policy was profoundly
transformed to favor market competition as a solution to socio-economic problems and the
governing of societies (Mudge, 2018). Numerous accounts have documented the rise of neo-
1 Often contained within the neoclassical synthesis of its day, post-WWII US economics was, by the
1960s, dominated by a Keynesian orientation that is clearly distinguished from what later became to
be known as neoliberalism, especially in its orientation around government intervention and the op-
eration of markets. We say ‘varieties’ here because there were different levels to which Keynesian
ideas were adopted, some more ’synthesized’ with neoclassical ideas and models, and some more
institutionalist than others.
Intellectual rivalry in American economics 3
from MIT and Harvard, directly influenced Kennedy and had a distinct set of messages
(Packenham, 1973, pp. 61–62). Reference to the ‘Charles River school of economics’ has
also been made in retrospective histories of the 1960s (Karaagac, 2002).2 We use this term
here for convenience, to refer to the collection of economists at both Harvard and MIT,
which represented the group of established intellectuals that Chicago had to surmount in or-
2. Theoretical motivation
Our study builds on previous work in the sociology of science and empirical historical work
on intergroup dynamics. To identify community structures tied to schools of thought,
2 In addition, in reviewing the fading of Keynesian dominance, Barraclough (1977) refers to ‘the bright
boys along the Charles river’. ‘Charles River economists’ are also referred to colloquially by critiques
of mainstream economists coming out of the area into the early 1990s (Clark, 1994).
3 Keynesians arguably did the same thing in the 1940s and the 1950s.
4 L. F. Henriksen et al.
scholars have studied collaboration and citation networks at the level of entire scientific dis-
ciplines (Price, 1965; Crane, 1972; Lievrouw, 1989), and linked such communities to scien-
tific paradigms (Small, 1980; McMahan and McFarland, 2021). Moody (2004), in
particular, stresses network cohesion as the key structural property of community strength.
Within intellectual communities, social cohesion occurs through shared ideas and inter-
quantitative methods (Cherrier and Svorencık, 2018), including the use of prosopographic
methods to trace groups of economists and their shared biographical characteristics
(Svorencık, 2018; Rossier, 2020). Such methods can identify ‘hidden hierarchies’ that are
obscured if one focuses only on the known leading stars (Svorencık, 2014, p. 110). We show
empirically that a peculiar divergence in how elite intellectual rivals organized socially
4 We justify the selection of Harvard and MIT specifically as rivals to Chicago drawing on range of his-
torical prestige and training metrics (see Data and Network Measures below, and Supplementary
Appendix A).
6 L. F. Henriksen et al.
his memoirs, Milton Friedman describes the social environment outside Chicago as
inhospitable:
Those of us who were deeply concerned about the danger to freedom and prosperity from the
growth of government, from the triumph of the welfare state and Keynesian ideas, were a small
Not only Friedman but also other scholars were questioned about their Chicago School
affiliations. Exchanges in the archival record reveal a real sensitivity to labels such as the
Chicago School, because it was seen as ideological. Important for our intergenerational ap-
proach is the fact that the particular costs of a Chicago reputation followed recent PhD
graduates around at the time (Bronfenbrenner, 1962, p. 72). What Chicagoans later referred
to as ‘the dark ages of Keynesian despotism’ was eventually overturned to a considerable de-
gree (Johnson 2003, p. 170). The professoriate associated with the Chicago School required
particular forms of socialization to challenge the Charles River Group’s dominance.
All Chicago graduate students were steeped in price theory to forge a common foundation
of knowledge. Emmet (2011) discusses how graduate students were trained in the core
courses by star professors and then placed into a battery of intensive workshops. The sys-
tem, emerging in the mid-1950 and fully developed by the mid-1960s, developed a collective
sense of belonging among the students. The business school was also kept intentionally close
the application of simple models to real-world problems. Debate was encouraged within this
broader focus rather than a concentrated doctrine. While MIT prided itself on focusing on
real-world economic problems as part of its curricula, by the late 1960s, MIT ‘was perceived
as too theoretically oriented and remote from real world issues’ (Fischer, 2004, p. 249).
On selective isolation, faculty at both Harvard and MIT were thoroughly involved in the
Although our archival work extended beyond these years, we focus on the period from
1960 to 1985, when rivalry among these groups was most intense. It is clear that during this
period Chicago challenged the place of two key departments which shuffled for elite suprem-
acy in US economics, Harvard and MIT. As communities of professors and their students,
the Chicagoans and the Charles River Group sought to occupy similar attention space, vied
for elite status and informed each other’s work.
We document the logic behind this matching, which entailed a wide range of historical
data on university and department prestige, as well as the perceived caliber of graduate
training.5 Choosing Harvard and MIT as a contrast to Chicago is also appealing because
they form a geographically proximate community of scholars, and the professors we select
from each were both part of a similar intellectual milieu at the time and recognized each
other as peers involved in the production of next generation scholars. This minimizes varia-
tion in propinquity, which is strongly associated with network formation and intellectual
production (Jaffe et al., 1993). Harvard and MIT were known for being strongholds of the
Keynesian–Neoclassical synthesis and institutional economics, theoretical paradigms that
the Chicagoans were explicitly attacking.
To obtain our cast of prominent scholarly proponents, we collected and coded 100 dif-
ferent texts that described either the neoliberal transition in economics or the professional
lives of economists linked to the intellectual environments of interest. We call these ‘mem-
oire’ texts, as they are usually backward-looking retrospectives on professional develop-
ments within the field, most often centered around one individual economist. These include
book chapters, published articles commemorating a career, festschrifts and many published
interviews. By coding each of the economists that was mentioned in these texts, we gener-
6 Stanley Fischer is in the blue community, although it cannot be seen here. Further details are
explained in Supplementary Appendix B. Full details and the methodological considerations can be
found in Young et al., 2022.
Intellectual rivalry in American economics 11
6. Results
6.1 In-group versus out-group citations
Figure 3 below presents the share of in-group ties in the citation network. The top panel
illustrates the total share of in-group citations for each group. Note that in our analysis we
observe only citations sent to the sampled professors and students. The share of in-group
ties in the total sample of professors and students is relatively constant, hovering around
0.65 throughout the period. Breaking down the distribution by groups reveals a striking de-
velopment. Whereas the share of in-group citations for the Charles River Group in the early
1960s—a period still associated with Keynesian dominance—was high and stable just above
0.7, this steeply decreased and dropped from 0.76 to 0.5 in the period 1965–1980. In
8 Similarly, Ash et al. (2022) study the consequences of training judges through the Manne economics
training program, which leads to stronger use of economics language in sentencing and harsher
sentences.
14 L. F. Henriksen et al.
contrast, the Chicago School group share of in-group ties increased from 0.35 to 0.67 during
the same period. If we interpret this as one form of social cohesion, the two groups experi-
enced a profound change in their overall levels of cohesion. The Charles River Group moved
from being highly cohesive in the early 1960s (which also confirms that they were a cohesive
intellectual collective despite their location at two different institutions within the same city)
Figure 3 Share of within group citations out of the total citations made by the group (dashed line is fit-
ted using a simple linear regression).
ties are acknowledgement ties that were reciprocated, which predominated among the blue
(Chicago) nodes. Figure 5 presents the cumulated reciprocity and transitivity in the acknowl-
edgement network, tracing the prevalence of each mechanism across the period.
In the leftmost panel of Figure 5, we observe cumulative reciprocity. In this case, it liter-
ally means ‘I thank you, you thank me’ dynamics within the journal publications of the
time. The Chicago School was more frequently engaging in reciprocation, and their share of
reciprocated ties increased over the period. In the beginning of the observation window,
16 L. F. Henriksen et al.
reciprocity was rare for both groups since a set of directed ties needs to be established before
they can be reciprocated. For the Charles River Group, it took 6 years before a tie had been
reciprocated, whereas for the Chicago School it took only 3 years. After their first reciproca-
tion, the Charles River Group’s share of reciprocated ties remained just below 2%. For
Chicago, the share was 0.05 in the early 1960s, then dropping to ca. 0.03 but in the early
Figure 4 Acknowledgement network, with Chicago in Blue and Charles River in Red.
Intellectual rivalry in American economics 17
orientations within the group much later than our other network data, which means that se-
lection and survivor bias could skew our indicators. On the other hand, this is a powerful in-
dicator of generational transfer of attitudes and its endurance into several decades after
these economists received their training.
We compared each set of professors for the Chicago School and the Charles River
7. Discussion
This article argues that the group identified with Chicago was more successful in reproduc-
ing social cohesion, even when the main rivals at Harvard and MIT were more initially
Intellectual rivalry in American economics 19
prominent in the US economics profession. Cohesion in the Chicago group carried across
generations, supporting the rise of neoliberal economics. Our analysis demonstrates that so-
cial cohesion in the Chicago School was quite limited during the early 1960s, when the
Charles River Group was highly cohesive and mainstream. This relative distribution of social
cohesion then flipped during the 1960s and 1970s. We posit that respective increases and
declines in social cohesion was a central enabling factor in the tectonic epistemic shift from
Keynesian dominance to the mainstreaming of neoliberal ideas during the 1970s and 1980s.
The Chicago School started from a position as self-perceived underdog, needing to build
cohesion within their own peer group with heavily concerted action from key figures like
Friedman and Stigler. Extant qualitative accounts stress how the Chicago School fostered so-
cialization through intensive training, an organized system of debate within a doctrine, and
selective isolation from other university environments while creating ties to the finance
20 L. F. Henriksen et al.
community. Chicago economists established close bonds with their students and a national
reputation for their bloodlust and ambition. Over time the group became more cohesive
both within its professoriate and in relations between professors and students. Value orien-
tations of Chicago students also resembled their professors to a great extent. The label
‘Chicago School’, initially rejected as ideological slander, was later embraced as a marker of
Such outcomes have a deeply social origin in how professors organized themselves and
socialized their students to give to their intellectual network momentum. Studying how intel-
lectual currents are sustained over generations is important in understanding what forms of
science are valued over others, as well as how mentor–mentee networks affirm power asym-
metries, including methodological and gender hierarchies within scholarly fields (Bandelj,
Acknowledgments
We thank Jacob Lunding, Elizabeth Sullivan-Hasson, Eric Winkler, Elliot Jerry and Pamela
Eisner, who all worked as research assistants on different parts of this project. We also acknowl-
edge Jenny Andersson, Michael Ash, Cornel Ban, Jens Beckert, Bruce Carruthers, Carol Heim,
Oddny Helgadóttir, Larry King, Elisa Klüger, Francisco Louç~
a, Doug McAdam, Mathieu Dufour,
Elsa Massoc, David Stark, Mitchell Stevens and Marc Ventresca for their comments. Our special
thanks also go to Thomas Ferguson for generative discussions about the project. Previous versions
of this paper were presented at seminars at the Copenhagen Business School, Columbia
University, Stanford University and at SASE conferences in 2016 and 2019. We are grateful to
staff at the Hoover Institute archive, the JFK Memorial Library archives, the Harvard University
Archives, the Duke University Rosenstein Library Archive, as well as staff in the Harvard and
Chicago economics departments for assistance with historical PhD graduation data.
Funding
This project received funding from the Velux Foundation (#00021820-NICHE), the
Institute for New Economic Thinking (#INO1500030) and the Independent Research Fund
Denmark grant (#5052-001143-B).
Supplementary material
Supplementary material in the form of appendices are available here.
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