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Among Professional Economists or Statisticians

Unlike in the past, concerns about economic productivity were rarely discussed until the 1940s, when measurements of national economies rose to prominence in social and political discourse. The development of systems to quantify national output, such as GDP, not only provided a way to measure productivity but made it seem worthy of consideration. However, there remains a lack of understanding about what GDP represents and how it was developed, despite being frequently cited. To critically examine GDP and other economic data, it is important to investigate how such measures originally came into use, as their present form and role are not inevitable or natural.

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68 views1 page

Among Professional Economists or Statisticians

Unlike in the past, concerns about economic productivity were rarely discussed until the 1940s, when measurements of national economies rose to prominence in social and political discourse. The development of systems to quantify national output, such as GDP, not only provided a way to measure productivity but made it seem worthy of consideration. However, there remains a lack of understanding about what GDP represents and how it was developed, despite being frequently cited. To critically examine GDP and other economic data, it is important to investigate how such measures originally came into use, as their present form and role are not inevitable or natural.

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kpatil.kp3750
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Unlike today, there was, as Jim Tomlinson has shown in an important essay, next to no concern about whether this

or that activity was economically productive; concern with productivity was episodic, underdeveloped and ill-focused. The apparent disappearance of questions of productiveness from mainstream economics had possibly played a role in this. In any event, it was only from the 1940s onwards that concerns about productiveness began to rise to a wholly new prominence in [social and political] discourse about the economy. And this rise, as Tomlinson demonstrates, was indelibly linked to the rise of measurement of the national economy. 27 The growth of national accounting and its measures of output not only provided a forum for the quantification of productiveness, but made productiveness something that appeared worthy of social and political consideration. Yet for such a powerful statistical metric that is so frequently and materially invoked, there is a remarkable lack of knowledge, in political, academic, and popular circles, about what GDP actually is and how, where and when it came into being. The late Hungarian statistician Zoltan Kenessey articulated this incongruence thus: Data pertaining to concepts such as GDP (or GNP) are quoted daily by the media. Yet the genesis of these concepts is not well known, not even among professional economists or statisticians.28 If we want critically to discuss national accounting data and their uses, however, it is vital to illuminate something of this etiology. After all, given the visibility and taken-for-grantedness of measures such as GDP, one could be forgiven for thinking not only that these measures have a long legacy, but that there was some sort of inevitability or naturalness to their original materialization. Neither assumption, though, is correct: national accounts are a relatively recent invention, emerging out of a very particular configuration of socio-economic, political, and intellectual circumstances.

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