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Angeletti, Thomas (2019)Socio-Economic Review. Online first, pp.1-23.ABSTRACT“This article analyzes how economics can frame political debates using economic policy devices. It examines the FIFI macroeconomic model’s introduction into the French planning processes of the mid-1960s and argues that economists perform two operations, selection and qualification, which play a key role in structuring political debates on the French economy’s future. Building on archives and in-depth interviews, I show how the FIFI model was a central component of the Sixth Plan (1971–1975): it was designed to produce simulations of state intervention in the French economy and organize planning commissions debates. Studying the struggles and controversies surrounding this model and the economic policies promoted by it, the article ultimately shows how certain political options are made publicly available while others are discarded.”EXTRACT“Economics plays a key role in how certain phenomena are put forward as public problems and others are discarded. Economics—like statistics—offers a ‘common language’ (Desrosières, 2008, p. 77) by promulgating a certain style of reasoning. Here, I advance a conceptual framework developed to characterize two different parts of the economist’s work, and propose a way to specify— and hopefully renew—the sociological approach to this phenomenon. I identify two main operations performed by economists, directly related to the way political debates are structured: selection and qualification. By selection, I mean the operation by which economists choose the entities and phenomena represented in their devices, such as inequalities, unemployment, wages and social hierarchy. By qualification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Boltanski, 2011), I mean the operation by which economists attribute a certain state to these entities and phenomena: for instance, wages can be characterized as an instrument of economic policy or simply as the outcome of an economic policy. By means of these two operations, economics plays a significant role in framing—and sometimes reducing—the terms of political debates. In the following, I define the two terms more precisely and explain why the existing literature has not fully addressed these terms before now.” (p. 4)