Governing inflation, disciplining society in Argentina (1950-1990). The transformation of a public problem in the print media

DANIEL, CLAUDIA; HEREDIA MARIANA

Austin

Jornada; Workshop Austin-UT-UNSAM; 2017

University of Texas at Austin

Historians agree that bringing inflation under control became a crucial challenge for western governments in the 1970s. It opened a space for experimentation in neoliberal policy. But even though there are numerous studies on inflation, the symbolic construction of prices? increase has been practically absent from the social science literature. Argentina, a country unmatched globally in terms of its history of inflation, offers a prime field to study it. Based on a systematic archival analysis of the two major national newspapers (La Nación and Clarín) during four decades (1950-1990), this paper proposes a long-term history about how inflation has been framed and fought in the second half of the 20th century in Argentina. Our key findings support Foucault?s argument that the rise of neoliberalism is linked to a new pattern of population understanding and management. We find two distinct regimes of inflation representation. From the 1950s to the 1970s, inflation was presented as a social and political phenomenon, intermingled with other sources of popular contention. There was no unified statistic to grasp the magnitude of inflation. There were a plurality of actors (social leaders, politicians, newspapers) vying for interpretations and solutions to prices? increase, rooted in diverse and conflicting representations of the economy. In this regime, we find public interventions had physical and even violent expressions in the public sphere. From the mid-1970s to the 1990?s, when inflation skyrocketed to 3 digits per year, its framing changed. Inflation was therefore linked to a unified statistic (IPC) and considered an economic problem. At the same time, it became the domain of economic experts, involving all society members with no further distinctions, requiring an aseptic intervention from a distance based on the recognition of individual freedom and the management of decentralized calculations.