Worth Measuring: Standardising Value Through the United Nations System of National Accounts, 1947-1985

Advisors: William Deringer (Columbia), N. Piers Ludlow (LSE)

This dissertation looks at the standardisation of the most powerful macroeconomic indicator of the post-war era, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It focuses on how this oft-criticised measure of value went global, by tracing the creation and development of the United Nations System of National Accounts. By applying the lens of standardisation to the history of GDP, it shows how the meaning of growth and prosperity was originally defined by a handful of economists within a very specific post-war moment, whose ideas were then applied to socioeconomic contexts far beyond their own purview. As such, it also sheds light on how even limited modes of knowledge ossify into institutional structures and become second nature.