An Age of Economics
"[T]he man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics"
Thus did Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. express his confidence at the turn of the century in the pragmatic potential of economic science. The notion that accumulated data would solve the mysteries of economic activity, offering Americans the tools to control their economic lives, was advanced from many sources in this period. The rise of large corporations in the late nineteenth century inspired new ways of visualizing capital as a network of interconnected flows. The ascent of mathematical economics in the academy in the 1880s and 1890s cast the economy as a self-contained, almost physical entity, responsive to force like an object in space. And the growth of the financial forecasting industry, buoyed by the expansion of national and international investment markets, generated new faith in the power of prediction.
These shifts in the economic and intellectual landscape of the early twentieth century left their imprint on the visual culture of capitalism. Increasingly, Americans of this period encountered representations of the economy stressing not providence, chance, or elite manipulation but the complex chains of cause and effect that explained economic events - and perhaps even allowed them to be tamed.
