This paper tells the development of economics at MIT between 1940 and 1972. The recruitment of Samuelson in 1940 fostered the establishment of a small community of economists within an engineering institute which was itself undergoing major transformations. A “new economics” was then shaped...

In this paper, we use archival sources, interviews, bibliometrics, text-mining and correspondance analysis to trace the development of a loose community of economists interested in indeterminacy and sunspots. We propose several explanations for the rise, marginalization and eventual...