Abstract
Little Big Number traces the contingent origins of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in crisis and wartime and its rise to near-universality in the US-led globalization of institutional and econometric templates that followed World War II. It argues that GDP encourages blindness to quality, justice, and sustainability in economic life and fosters the assimilation of all of life (not just what is familiarly styled “economic”) to the purblind economic logic that results.
This is a real argumentative achievement. Criticisms of the GDP’s extravagances (such as recording policing and prisons as gains) and omissions (such as environmental health and uncompensated labor) are familiar territory, as Dirk Philipsen is glad to admit. So is the argument that a rather uncritical agenda of economic growth substituted for real political engagement with questions of how to live together in the US-led world (and especially in the United States itself) after World War II. But it is especially helpful to find these arguments joined with an account of the GDP’s appearance as the product of a series of heroic emergency measures, whose primary architect, Simon Kuznets, knew early on that its national wealth metric did not even approximate a creditable account of well-being.
Such work is the quarry of a certain kind of critically minded historian: from the queerest and most contingent origins comes the spirit, or at least the emblem, of an age. It also takes part in what one might call the linguistic turn as applied to statistics: recognition of the role of constructed terms of discourse in shaping the imagination, the social practice, and the materiality of the world.
The book is also admirable for its consistent recognition that politics and law come before economics, at least before economies. Economies of any scale and complexity do not and cannot arise or persist without a state to make and enforce the rules of cooperation—ultimately including the measure of value. From all of this, it follows that we—the artificial we of sovereignty—can unmake and remake GDP just as we first made it. We can reprogram our official account of value for a greener, more equal, and more beautiful world.
Excellent. My question is whether the argument is somewhat too constructivist. It offers us, in effect, a few key pieces of enlightenment: the economy we inhabit produces much that we do not have reason to prize: stress, overwork, eroded personal ties, hypertrophied self-interest, unbounded avarice, and degradation of many of our natural and built environments. Our most influential measures of aggregate economic performance values what we do not prize and fails to value much that we have reason to prize. These are important insights. But how to translate enlightenment into explanation and action?
Explanation and action are linked desiderata because, to remake the economy, it would be helpful to know how it took the form it has. How much, really, do overwork, stress, and insecurity trace back to GDP, as opposed to (a few candidates): the smashing of unions, the neoliberal erosion of the postwar welfare state, the hollowing out of stable middle-class and blue-collar employment by globalization and technological shifts, and the fact that all of these changes coincided with women’s large-scale entrance into the workforce, meaning the work of social reproduction has become an uncompensated second career for many women and men? How much of this would have gone differently if our national statistics had included some effort at measuring happiness and accounting for uncompensated labor? To my mind, stronger unions, political demands for social provision (including socializing more of the cost of social reproduction), and an extension of governance structures alongside (rather than desperately trailing) globalizing capital would have made much more difference, but none of these would have been entailed by a different method of national accounting.
Similarly, has our environmental degradation arisen in any very important way from our failure to subtract it from our national accounts? The pressures driving tropical deforestation and the loss of carbon-critical mangrove forests seem rooted in poverty, population growth, and other sources of urgent need that would not have been mitigated by a different GDP, although Brazil, Indonesia, and India would look to have grown less quickly than under now-conventional measures. As long as the coal companies are able to survive a legal gantlet and make a dollar wrecking the mountains of central Appalachia, they will keep doing so, no matter how mountaintop-removal mining shows up in national accounts.
Philipsen’s instance of the Chinese Communist Party assessing its officials by their contribution to GDP is poignant, and I don’t have the Sinological chops to quarrel with it, but even here, I suspect that GDP is the tail, not the dog, and that the real driver is the Party’s having staked its legitimacy on delivering factory jobs, apartments, and consumer goods, even at the cost of social dislocation and pollution. There is plenty of evidence that this has been a nasty mixed bargain, but also quite a bit of evidence that it has been a more than tolerable bargain from the point of view of the population it was meant to win over. That is, it doesn’t seem that GDP blinded the Communist Party as to either its goals or the policy goals to pursue them.
Then there is the question of how GDP-talk interpellates us. Philipsen compares the GDP to race, as a construct that distorts our consciousness and experience. But I am not sure the claim holds. While—to my great regret—I do go around “seeing” race (or perhaps I should say seeing “race”) every day, I do not see “national wealth.” I don’t see it in new cars and highways (as against my riding a bicycle that dates to the second Bush administration) or in a new diabetes clinic at Duke, in the Durham Jail downtown. They make me feel that the world is poor and sad. And it is no part of my thought about an afternoon spent foraging mushrooms, stacking stones, or gathering driftwood that my eccentric pleasures, and the company of the friends who share them with me, add nothing to national wealth. I don’t feel any poorer for that.
So my question is what work the GDP really does. How much explanation does it provide for our hectic, hard-used, overstuffed, and under-provisioned world, and how much of the key to changing that world is in it? A maximalist version of Philipsen’s argument would answer, A lot. A minimalist version would reply, Not much, really. Instead, on the minimalist version, the GDP is a kind of parable for our condition, for a way of coordinating our economic lives that seems to sneak behind us and rob our world of precious things with one hand while it delivers new prizes with the other. In that case, the parable would simply point to all the other questions we need to ask: how is it that our economy produces inequality and precarity, celebrates unlimited acquisition as a mark of personal virtue, and amplifies the felt (even urgent) need for money and things even as we cross new frontiers of unprecedented aggregate material wealth? How could we move, not just toward a metric, but toward a social order that actively cultivated and honored the labor of social reproduction, the spontaneous life of the earth, the beauty of places, and the quality of human ties?
My own sense is that the case against the GDP as culprit is not proven, and the case for new accounting metrics as liberating is the same. Maybe Philipsen agrees with me and would accept that his argument comes down a parable about all the necessary work that we’ve dodged in the last century and need to take on in the next one if it isn’t going to get a lot worse.
I don’t know how much it matters, really. We agree on the direction we’d like to see the world take, and surely we agree that the nature of historical change is opaque. And we agree that, wherever we go, we will need to count, and knowing what to count is always more important than knowing how.