Economic policy is too important NOT to be left to professional economists. This is so clear in Argentina nowadays, that no presidential candidate for the 1999 election, has picked up as his minister of economics, someone who do not have intensive training in "modern" economic analysis. This has been so since mid 1980's, and it has been increasingly so since the beginning of the 1960's. This paper describes the history of the relationship between professional economists and economic policy in Argentina: as analyzers and forecasters, designers and implementers (one natural extension would answer the following question: where these professional economists got the inspiration from: their professors, the "schools" of the time?). "Massive" modern professional training in economics is roughly four decades old in Argentina, as a result of the fact that "since 1957-59 US universities like Harvard, Chicago, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Texas, etc., began receiving argentine students of economics in their graduate programs" (Dagnino Pastore and Fernandez López, 1988)∗1, and public and newly founded private universities separated studies in economics from accountancy2. I'm not saying that before the end of the 1950's there was no talent in charge of economic policy. Juan J. Romero and Carlos Pellegrini on debt restructuring during the 1890's, Federico Pinedo and Raúl Prebisch on handling the impact of the Great Depression during the 1930's, Prebisch on the reconstructing of the argentine economy after the overthrown of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 (Prebisch, 1955 and 1956)3, are excellent examples of the use of "sound economics" for solving problems, without exposure to formal "modern" economic analysis4. But I want to restrict the scope of this paper to professional economists's interaction with economic policy. This story will probably surprise nobody. In Argentina professional economists interaction with economic policy started through modeling issues and performing short run economic analysis, followed by designing tools and working in economic teams in non crucial roles, and eventually taking themselves the responsibility of design and implementation of economic policy.