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MacDonald premiership to present the government with expert advice that could inform its response to the Great Depression—an instance which, with its internal quarrels between ‘Keynesians’ and ‘Free Traders,’ was an apt synecdoche of the economic debates of the day, and indeed of those to come. Accordingly, much of NIESR’s senior staff has since then been closely connected to (and sometimes actually been) some of the most influential British economists of their time, perhaps especially those working for public institutions such as the BoE, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and other government departments.1 The Institute’s founding coincides with a growing preponderance of quantitative tools and models in the economics discipline, especially since the 1930s. At that time, these methodologies informed a wider effort to supply the economic and demographic knowledge governments demanded in the aftermath of the 1929 crisis and the Second World War, so as to produce socio-scientific evidence to justify governance decisions (Mirowski 2002). In the years leading to NIESR’s foundation, economists increasingly sought to provide authoritative knowledge that policymakers could refer to, specifying a scientifically sound course of action under a broadly positivistic matrix. More specifically still, and given its origins in British economics, NIESR’s foundation is linked to a then dominant postwar technocratic ethos, with a notable focus on growth and full employment—hence its emphasis on GDP, productivity, labour, and industry. However, notwithstanding continuous efforts to be perceived as ideologically neutral, after the 1970s monetarist apogee (and a political reframing of Keynes’ ideas) NIESR has many times been called ‘Keynesian’ by those contesting their claims (e.g., ConservativeHome 2013). Internationally, the Institute is comparable to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States and the Konjunktur institutes of northern Europe.2 These organisations, much like NIESR, produce independent forecasts and indicators to supply governments with policy-relevant econometric knowledge. They also share NIESR’s 1Although NIESR went through a hiatus during WWII, due to the concentration of economists in the war effort, it became stronger after the war (Jones, op. cit.; Robinson 05/1988). 2These include the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in Germany and the Swedish Konjunkturinstitutet, founded in 1925 and 1937, respectively.
