Who Came First: Politicians or Academic Economists?

Abstract

In this text an analysis is presented concerning who were first to form and accept new macroeconomic policy ideas in Sweden: economic politicians or professional economists. Those ideas were later to be accepted in international mainstream economics. Four paradigmatic shifts, all of them connected to economic - unemployment and/or inflation - crises, are studied: 1) The so called New Economics in the 1930s; 2) the forming of the Rehn & Meidner model and its implementation in the 1940s to 1960s; 3) the gradual shift from Keynesianism to monetarism and norm based theory during the last three decades of the 20th century; 4) the effects on economic thinking of the crisis in 2008/09. The result is that in cases 1, 2 and 4 initiatives to change policies rather came from politicians than from academic professional economists. In case 3 the result is more uncertain.