This chapter focuses on John M. Hunter, the thirty-nine-year-old Illinois native who spoke as director of Colombia's first economic research center and addressed readers of one of Colombia's premier journals of economic research, the Revista del Banco de la República. It also talks about economics in Latin America. During the years after 1945, Colombian universities established freestanding economics programs where none had existed before. There had been men called economists in Colombia for decades; they were brilliant lawyers, engineers, businessmen, and politicians who made national economic policy and taught occasional courses in political economy on the side. But the crisis of the 1930s had inspired a new regard for economic expertise as a specialized form of knowledge, and Colombians set out to create a new kind of economist to steer the state. The invention of economics as an independent discipline, a nineteenth-century process in the United States and much of Europe, was thus a twentieth-century phenomenon in Latin America, born of new visions of national development and spearheaded by renowned men in business and government.
Foreign Economic Policy for the United States
