This thesis presents an intellectual history of the historiography of Australian Economic History between 1918 and 1965. More specifically, it is a contribution to a relatively novel area of research into 'disciplinary history’. It takes as its basic analytical material the four books widely used for significant lengths of time for undergraduate teaching during the period of the study. The thesis consists of five main chapters, plus an appendix which surveys the institutional development of Australian Economic History and provides the empirical basis for the selection of the works named above. After a brief introduction and overview, the next four chapters consist of a detailed study of one of these works, the historical context in which each was written, and an intellectual biography. The fifth chapter is largely theoretical and conceptual. It analyses the epistemological bases of History and Economics and explores the implications of different models of knowledge for the relationship between Economic History and its two antecedent disciplines, History and Economics. Current perceptions of the state of the discipline in Australia and overseas are also examined. There are three main propositions advanced and their implications explored in the fifth chapter. First, that changes which occurred in Australian Economic History during the period 1918-1965 shifted the discipline from the broad area of History to the broad area of Economics. Second, that the inherent tension and fundamental differences between the two disciplinary areas of History and Economics have profound and complex implications for Australian Economic History at a number of levels and in a number of areas. The third proposition posits that the paradigm shift of the 1950s/1960s in Australian Economic History, and the paradigm shift of the 1960s/1970s in Economic History respectively have resulted in crisis. The final part of the chapter summarises the contents of the preceding chapters, and draws some conclusions based on those detailed studies.

In 1719, Daniel Defoe wrote his first fiction The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe without knowing that the protagonist of the novel, Robinson Crusoe, would be liberated from his cultural matrix and deployed as a dominant economic metaphor with the advent of the so-called marginalist revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. This thesis intends to: i) with reference to an habits of thought approach, unearth the institutional nature of the metamorphosis of Crusoe from a figure of the literary realm to the economic man of neoclassical economics, and ii) based on a rereading of Defoe&rsquo / s original text, offer an alternative reinterpretation which would turn upside down the prevalent presuppositions of neoclassical economics portraying an isolated, universal and axiomatically rational Crusoe. Accordingly, in this study, Crusoe is presented as a specific time- and space-bound human being preserving and perpetuating his institutionally forged character traits even during his sojourn on the &lsquo / institution-free&rsquo / uninhabited island / a methodological and expeditious man, whose rationality was based not on the fulfillment of axioms but on reasoning / and an entrepreneur aiming at economic development through innovation.

The central theme of the thesis is how clothing and, to a lesser degree, fashion affected the lives of women in the period from 1919 to 1949. The practical impact of clothing on women is rarely assessed to the same degree as other essentials of life such as food and housing, yet obtaining, maintaining and renewing clothing stocks were issues of the utmost importance to women, particularly those from low-income households, in the inter-war period and the Second World War. The first half of the thesis concentrates upon the role of clothing in the home and in popular culture in the inter-war period. Of particular importance is the role of clothing in the household budget, a subject which has received limited attention from social historians. In households with limited incomes, finding the means to purchase clothing was problematic, and women often resorted to unconventional methods of saving and spending. The role of clothing in middle-class households is examined as well, with an emphasis on the many varieties of shops which supplied ready- to-wear clothing, as well as souces of made-to-measure clothing. And, while antiquarian and sociological studies of fashion abound, little has been written on the practical impact of fashion in the lives of ordinary people. With the development of a mass market after the First World War, the influence of fashion was extended to most of the social classes. Rather than re-examining the changing modes themselves, it is useful to study the impact these fashions had upon people: in the way they regarded and treated one another; and in the way they perceived themselves. The study of the inter-war years thus offers a foundation from which to examine the role of clothing in the Second World War. The price of clothing and footwear rose steeply in the early months of the war, but stabilised once rationing and austerity measures took hold. The ways in which women budgeted, saved for and purchased clothing are discussed, with an emphasis on how these methods differed from pre-war habits. Although the development and implementation of government initiatives is described, the latter portion of the thesis concentrates on the practical effects of such schemes in the day-to-day lives of the British people. The role of fashion in the wartime economy is addressed as well. Austerity programmes stalled any extreme changes in fashion, people wore the same clothing year after year, and uniforms were almost universal. Nevertheless, issues of fashion and style remained important to the public, who in any case were encouraged to maintain high standards of dress and appearance as a sign of patriotism.

This work investigates the historical development of mechanized agriculture within the framework of family farming in Friesland province, the Netherlands. The research follows changing domestic composition in three historic municipalities which have been incorporated into the present day municipality of Franekeradeel. Changes within households are compared to changes in the sources of farm labor and the number of people and farms commercially involved in agriculture. The overall impact of these changes is then weighed with respect to the demographic, as well as the spatial make-up of the rural locality. The objective of the research is to study cultural continuity under conditions of rapidly changing technology. The main inquiry focuses on how rural families have modified productive and consumptive technologies over the last one hundred years to fit local and domestic social conditions. The primary focus is to study how an expansion of agricultural productivity has been effected within the households organizing farming. The secondary focus has been to study the effect expanding productivity has on farming households and local rural society. The analytical framework outlines changing dimensions of property rights by focusing on changes in the social form of labor, which is itself a dynamic property relationship. Other dimensions of historic property relations explored include domestic dynamics, technical change, land tenure patterns, patterns of productive ownership and devolution. Results of the demographic research indicate that since the advent of industrial processing, particularly dairying and crop harvesting, lack of employment and changing expectations for women have led to a higher outmigration of women than men, engendering changes in domestic composition. A diminished number of female headed households and a diminished retention of unmarried adult female, versus male children within the domestic unit are two primary markers. Conclusions arising from the analysis of the social construction of property rights indicate an ongoing diminution of private alienable rights, in favor of increased public/state allocation of property right's content. The construction of rights around the ownership of dairy production values following the establishment of the 1983 European Community quota system provides an example of this.

As the discipline of economics professionalized during the interwar period, two schools of thought emerged: institutionalism and neoclassical economics. By 1954, after the publication of Arrow and Debreu’s landmark article on general equilibrium theory, consensus formed around neoclassical economics. This outcome was significantly influenced by trends in the philosophy of science, notably the transformation from the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle to an ‘Americanized’ version of logical empiricism that was dominant through the 1950s. This version of logical empiricism provided a powerful ally to neoclassical economics by affirming its philosophical and methodological commitments as examples of “good science”. This dissertation explores this process of consensus formation by considering whether consensus would be judged normatively appropriate from the perspective of three distinct approaches to the philosophy of science; Carl Hempel’s logical empiricism, Thomas Kuhn’s account of theory change and Helen Longino’s critical contextual empiricism. The conclusion is that there is no ‘consensus on consensus’. Longino’s approach reveals the ways in which alignments between mid-century philosophy of science and neoclassical economics mask the normative commitments implicit in both disciplines. Moreover, Longino’s alternative set of theoretical virtues reveal how questioning the standards of “good science” yields very different conclusions about both the scientific credentials and viability of institutional economics. My conclusion is that a pluralistic approach to the philosophy of science is essential to fully understanding the case study of mid-century economics. / Philosophy

Division One: “Malthus Gets Fat” (Two Chapters) Chapter One develops a simple dynamic model to examine the takeoff from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It finds that several factors, most notably the rate of technological progress and the economic structure, determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without declining living standards; this is termed maximum sustainable population growth. It is only when this maximum sustainable rate exceeds the peak rate at which a society expands that takeoff can occur. I also investigate the effects of trade and international income transfers on the ability to sustain takeoff. It is also shown that present income growth is not necessarily indicative of the ability to sustain takeoff and that factors which increase current income growth may actually inhibit takeoff, and vice versa. Chapter Two applies the sustainable population growth framework to Britain during the Industrial Revolution. The model shows a dramatic increase in sustainable population growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution, well before the beginning of modern levels of income growth. The main contributions to the British breakout were technological improvements and structural change away from agricultural production. At least until the middle of the 19th Century, coal, capital and trade played a minor role. Division Two: “Leverage and Financial Market Instability” (Four Chapters) Chapter One develops a model of how leverage induces explosive behavior in financial markets. I show that when levered investors become too large relative to the market as a whole, the demand curve for securities can suddenly become upward-sloping as levered investors are exposed to forced liquidations. The size and leverage of all levered investors defines the minimum elasticity-adjusted market size for stability or MinEAMASS, which is the smallest elasticity-adjusted market size that can support the group of levered investors analyzed. This gives rise to a measure of instability that can predict when markets become vulnerable to a leverage-driven market liquidity crisis. Chapter Two iterates the model of Chapter One forward in time to generate an inflating bubble that suddenly bursts, reproducing many of Kindleberger's (1996) stylized facts about the dynamics of bubbles in a simple framework. Chapter Three applies my measure of instability in a historical investigation of the 1998 demise of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). I find that a forced liquidation of LTCM threatened to destabilize some financial markets, particularly for bank funding and equity volatility. Chapter Four discusses how the model applied to the stock market crash of 1929. There the evidence suggests that a tightening of margin requirements in the first nine months of 1929 combined with price declines in September and early October caused enough investors to become constrained that the market was tipped into instability, triggering the sudden crash of October and November.

This study aims to generate a more robust understanding of public attitudes regarding non-renewable natural resource markets. Employing a comparative-historical case study method, it analyzes three waves of widespread fear that swept the United States over the course of the twentieth century regarding an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil. Each of these periods of fear over oil supply availability coincided with a significant rise in the price of crude oil, only to be followed by a sudden collapse as new production came onstream in response to higher prices. The study utilizes process tracing and pattern matching techniques to examine the linkages between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the crude oil market, oil price movements, and expert predictions of and other public expressions of belief that oil in the United States would become scarcer and more expensive in the future. This dissertation’s core arguments contribute to existing theoretical debates in three ways. First, by providing a comparative historical portrait of cyclical patterns in public and expert beliefs regarding non-renewable resource availability and long-term price behavior, the study puts contemporary debates over the future of oil supply in historical perspective. It allows the rampant claims of, and widespread belief in, a global shortage of oil that have gained popularity over the last decade—most notably, in the so-called “peak oil” movement—to be situated within a broader chronological context. It also extends and deepens earlier historical work analyzing oil shortage scares in the United States, both in terms of their underlying dynamics and their effect on federal government policy relative to the oil industry. Second, the study establishes the link between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the oil market, generally reflected in oil prices, and the degree of media attention given to, and apparent public belief in, an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In so doing, it demonstrates the applicability of Shiller’s (2000, 2005) conceptualization of new era economic theory formation and popularization to observed phenomena in the oil market, but with a crucial difference. Rather than new era economic thinking taking the form of unbounded optimism about the future, in the case of the oil market new era thinking has tended to be manifested as the pessimistic belief that an impending, irreversible shortage of oil would lead to a long-term, even perpetual, rise in oil prices. The study suggests two modifications to the concept that enhance its greater explanatory leverage with regard to exhaustible resource markets: one, that often the new era predictions most widely cited during shortage scares were actually made prior to the boom in prices, to little fanfare, but subsequently deemed prophetic by new era proponents; and two, that the new era narratives often contained normative elements. Moral judgments—in particular, condemnation of the oil economy’s degradation of the natural environment—have often intertwined with predictions that the oil supply was more limited than widely believed and that prices were destined to continue rising. Third, the study demonstrates that the concept of narratives of decline, as described by Bennett (2001) and Lieber (2008), constitutes a powerful theoretical lens through which to understand trends in popular opinion with regard to non-renewable resource availability, and to asset prices more generally—a link that has heretofore gone unrecognized. It finds that a positive feedback loop tended to exist between popular fears of a new era of oil shortages, marked by a long-term rise in prices, and related narratives of the environmental and relative political-economic decline of the United States.

Cette thèse explore l'élargissement du champ d’analyse de la science économique hors de ses frontières traditionnelles, vers l’étude de phénomènes aussi divers que la discrimination, le comportement politique ou encore les comportements familiaux. Nous soutenons qu’une telle évolution s’accompagna de l’élargissement du domaine d’intervention de l’Etat aux Etats-Unis à partir de la deuxième moitié des années 1940, qui stimula l’émergence de questions « aux frontières » des sciences sociales. Ainsi, la perception de ce qui relève de l’économique, du social ou du politique s’en trouva brouillée. En retour, ces évolutions favorisèrent le franchissement des barrières disciplinaires par les économistes. Nous identifions trois étapes distinctes dans l’évolution du champ d’analyse de la science économique. Premièrement, dans un contexte marqué par la Guerre Froide, les économistes s’intéressèrent aux questions relevant du domaine traditionnel de la science politique, telles que celles du choix collectif. Deuxièmement, a partir du début des années 1960, mais surtout durant le mandat de Lyndon Johnson, les économistes s’intéressèrent progressivement à l’étude des problèmes sociaux en lien avec la notion de pauvreté, tels que la discrimination, l’éducation, le crime ou encore la santé. Enfin, dans les années 1970, le dernier stade de l’évolution des frontières de la science économique fut marqué par la disparition progressive de barrières thématiques a priori. Forts du succès de leurs analyses du politique et du social, certains économistes défendirent l’idée que leur discipline n’était plus définie par un domaine d’analyse, mais par ses outils. / This thesis studies the expansion of the scope of economics to the study of phenomena traditionally considered to lie outside of the domain of economics. We claim that such a development came with the expansion of the domain of government intervention from the late 1940s on, which raised interdisciplinary questions. What was considered to be “economic”, “social” or “political” phenomena evolved and blurred. In return, this stimulated economists to overstep the traditional disciplinary boundaries. We identify three steps in the expansion of the scope of economics. First, in the context of the Cold War society, economists progressively studied political phenomena such as the problem of collective choice. Second, in the 1960s, and more precisely during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, economists became progressively interested in the study of social problems related to the notion of poverty, such as discrimination, education, crime or public health. Finally, in the 1970s, the last step of the development of the scope of economics was characterized by the progressive fading of any a priori disciplinary boundaries. Vindicated by the success of their economic approach to political and social phenomena, some economists argued that their discipline was not defined by its field of analysis, but rather by its tools.

This thesis is an historical study of the formation of Thatcherite economic thinking and policymaking with a particular focus upon investigating the part played by economic ideas and economists in Thatcherism. While some economists and economic ideas are closely associated with Thatcherism, Thatcherites were hostile to the bulk of Britain’s economists residing in universities and in the Government Economic Service and skeptical of the usefulness of economic theory in policymaking. Thatcherites thought that British academic and government economists supported a ‘Keynesian consensus’ which was purported to have been in operation since the Second World War and had allegedly retarded Britain’s growth from a quasi-mythical free-enterprise Victorian high-point. However, Thatcherites were keen to win the ‘battle of ideas’ and became eager ‘buyers’ of economic ideas – Keith Joseph particularly – in a ‘marketplace in economic ideas’ which developed over the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Yet, Thatcherites were not suddenly converted to neoliberal economic thinking by the marketplace in economic ideas. Instead, Thatcherites pragmatically sought out ideas which could be adopted and adapted in combination with long-standing ideological beliefs which were hostile to the size and role of the state and in favour of ‘sound money.’ Thatcherite economic thinking developed to include sometimes contradictory strands of supply-side economics, Austrian economics, monetarism/rational expectations and public choice economics but also contained, particularly for Margaret Thatcher, elements of ‘businessmen’s economics’ and ‘housewife economics.’ A case study of privatisation policy illustrates the point that pre-existing Thatcherite thinking, such as the desire to ‘roll back the state’, provided the core underlying rationale for economic policies. Yet, Thatcherites were also able to use a jumbled amalgam of economic ideas such as Austrian and neoclassical economics to promote secondary objectives such as introducing competition when conditions were judged as favourable by Thatcherites.

In my dissertation I survey the historic progress of the reality TV and the reality show, focussing on the specific genre of the talent shows, which stands for the current phenomenon of the entertainment industry in TV broadcasting. Using the method of the oral history I'll explain in detail the principals of running these shows on chosen formats and point out how different or same strategies can appear in shows all over the world. Further I'll focus on the structure and the level of a production, main features of the audience personality and behaviour, for example forming the relationship between the viewer and the participants on the basing on personal stories or praising and idealising the competitors. The next step of my analysis will be a depiction of the economic thesis and rules, which run the talent shows, which give them a direction and drive them on the TV market. I'll give an insight into the terms as the affective economics, building lovemarks or an inspiring fan, which are characteristic for the era of the convergence of media, which are considerably covered by talent shows. In the end my work depicts also the role of the jury and their specific trail, which are necessary for the viewer ratings and potential success of the certain show. Further my work will point out the typical marks...