ABSTRACT
Economics reigns supreme in politics. Predictions of economic growth seem to be proportionally related nowadays to public confidence and government approval rates.1 Nonetheless, the political omnipresence of economics is far from new. The discipline that came of age during the first half of the twentieth century managed increasingly to hold sway over public affairs. This development has been described as a ‘global story’, with economists and their vocabulary increasingly dominating media, bureaucracy and politics.2 With the Depression of the 1930s setting the stage for extensive government intervention, the period after the Second World War were years of economic expertise par excellence: the ‘Stunde der Ökonomen’, the hour of the economists, in which ‘all industrialised post-war states managed their economies by drawing on technical economic expertise’.3
