Mapping the Future.
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Laetitia Lenel
Laetitia Lenel is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research project, which is part of the Priority Programme 1859 “Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour” funded by the German Research Foundation, explores the Euro-American history of business cycle forecasting in the twentieth century.
Abstract
The recognition of the key importance of economic stability after World War I sparked interest in business forecasting on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the creation and the rapid international and domestic dissemination of the Harvard Index of General Business Conditions in the early 1920s, which contemporaries celebrated as the first “scientific” approach to business forecasting. Drawing on multi-site archival research, the paper analyses the extension of the index by an information-exchange-based method in the 1920s and traces its influence on the survey-based forecasting approach employed by American companies in the 1930s. Engaging with the current debate on the temporal order of capitalism, the article argues that business forecasting was not only a means of stabilizing capitalism, but a factor and an indicator of a change in the dynamics of capitalism in the interwar period.
About the author
Laetitia Lenel is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research project, which is part of the Priority Programme 1859 “Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour” funded by the German Research Foundation, explores the Euro-American history of business cycle forecasting in the twentieth century.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Jeremy Adelman, William Deringer, Christian Flow, Michael Gordin, Mark Jakob, Marcus Mikulcak, Mary S. Morgan, Veronika Settele, Jochen Streb, and to the members of the History of Science program seminar at Princeton University for their helpful comments on this work.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Abhandlungen
- Erfahrung und Erwartung – eine vernachlässigte wirtschaftshistorische Perspektive?
- Marktprognosen im Interesse der Strukturpolitik
- Mapping the Future.
- Grain Policies and Storage in Southern Germany: The Regensburg Hospital (17th-19th Centuries)
- There’s No Place Like Home: Investors’ Home Bias in Germany, 1898-1934
- Kinderwunsch im Krieg: Kriegserfahrung und Fertilität in Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg
- Woher kommen Erwartungen?
- Fictional Expectations and the Global Media in the Greek Debt Crisis: A Topic Modeling Approach
- Forschungs- und Literaturberichte
- Real Wages in Germany during the First Phase of Industrialization, 1850-1889
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Abhandlungen
- Erfahrung und Erwartung – eine vernachlässigte wirtschaftshistorische Perspektive?
- Marktprognosen im Interesse der Strukturpolitik
- Mapping the Future.
- Grain Policies and Storage in Southern Germany: The Regensburg Hospital (17th-19th Centuries)
- There’s No Place Like Home: Investors’ Home Bias in Germany, 1898-1934
- Kinderwunsch im Krieg: Kriegserfahrung und Fertilität in Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg
- Woher kommen Erwartungen?
- Fictional Expectations and the Global Media in the Greek Debt Crisis: A Topic Modeling Approach
- Forschungs- und Literaturberichte
- Real Wages in Germany during the First Phase of Industrialization, 1850-1889
