Direct performative effects were weak but market influence made students eager to learn finance

Evidence

The case for seeing the growing priority given by American corporations to market-value maximization as a direct performative effect of financial economics is therefore weak. However, once the students in American business schools realized the strength of the influence of the financial markets on the fate of the corporations that were going to employ them and increasingly on their own personal wealth too they would be likely to be far keener to learn about those markets than they had been in the 1950s, when the Harvard Business School’s course on investments was the despised “darkness at noon” described in chapter 3. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1176

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the indirect performativity channel (through MBA education) versus direct channel; connects to chapter 3’s account of Harvard.