{podcast} Knowledge@Wharton: How did the role of economists begin to evolve after World War II? Binyamin Appelbaum: The very idea of a discipline called macroeconomics — the idea that you could take stock of the entire economy, measure it and manage it — is really a product of the Great Depression. When the United States enters the Great Depression, the government literally has no idea how large the American economy is. The Senate hires an economist to figure it out, and he comes back a couple of years later and says, “Well it used to be this big and now it’s a lot smaller.” That is sort of the beginning of measuring ... (full story)