Inflación y crisis nacional. Culturas económicas y espacios públicos en la Argentina y Brasil

Abstract

This article describes some aspects of the association between inflation and national crisis in Brazil and Argentina, exploring the relationship between two processes: the transformation of the professionals of economics in public intellectuals, and the shift from qualitative to quantitative perceptions of monetary instability, parallel to the transformation of index numbers in “social numbers”, which deserve public trust. Both processes coincide with the transformation of the economic knowledge in economic cultures, an idiom which serves to describe national problems outside the close world of specialists. The article describes a period which begins in the middle of the XX Century, when the field of economist on these countries was reconfigured, and the middle of the 1980s, when the stabilizations plans known as “heterodox” were lunched.