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Luke Messac // Outside the Economy: Women’s Work and Feminist Economics in the Construction and Critique of National Income Accounting

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Peter Burgess

Taylor & Francis OnlineTop Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Reprints & Permissions PDF Skip to Main Content Taylor and Francis Online Log in | Register Cart Enter keywords, authors, DOI etc. Search in: Advanced search Publication Cover Journal The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Volume 46, 2018 - Issue 3 Journal homepage 58 Views 0 CrossRef citations 38 Altmetric Articles Outside the Economy: Women’s Work and Feminist Economics in the Construction and Critique of National Income Accounting Luke Messac Pages 552-578 | Published online: 21 Feb 2018 Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2018.1431436 In this article ABSTRACT Introduction Amassing a Multivariate Data Set: The Nyasaland Nutrition Survey Phyllis Deane and the Hesitant Birth of a Method National Income Reigns Supreme The Feminist Critique of National Income’s Methods and Uses Conclusion References ABSTRACT Concerns about women’s work were present at the advent of the modern method of national income accounting, and they have featured prominently in the most radical critiques of this method. During and after the Second World War, Phyllis Deane, a young researcher working under the supervision of Richard Stone, Austin Robinson and Arthur Lewis, grappled with the conceptual difficulties involved in measuring the ‘national’ incomes of mostly rural subsistence colonies in British central Africa. In constructing her estimates, Deane relied heavily on a multidisciplinary survey of nutrition conducted in interwar Nyasaland. Deane’s work was essentially an exercise in reductionism and bounding; she sought to extract from these data a single monetary estimate of production. Yet Deane also proved unwilling to exclude too much. She broke with her advisors’ favoured convention that activities not involved in market exchange should be excluded from the national income. Successive national income accountants around the world would reach disparate conclusions on method, particularly on the question of the ‘production boundary’—that is, the dividing line between those productive activities that would be included in the national income and those that would not. This issue became most contentious in the sphere of ‘non-monetary’ or ‘subsistence’ production performed mostly by female producers. While some statisticians included firewood collection, beer brewing and cooking, many others thought such activities beyond the bounds of ‘the economy’. Early decisions about the status of non-monetary production influenced the international standards enshrined in the United Nations System of National Accounts, first published in 1953. Beginning in the 1970s, second-wave feminists criticised the invisibility of women’s work in national income estimates. These critiques helped spur the inclusion of non-monetary activities in the accounts of many nations. Yet by the 1990s, many feminist critics—most notably New Zealand-born political economist Marilyn Waring—sought to move beyond GDP as a measure of welfare. These feminists called instead for greater reliance on measures such as the Human Development Index and time-use surveys. These measures may have appeared new, but they required the same multidisciplinary and intensive methods as Nyasaland’s interwar nutrition survey, which had served as the substrate for the earliest calculation of a ‘colonial national’ income. Drawing upon archives in the United Kingdom, Malawi and the United States, this paper argues that feminist economists and women’s work were central to both the post-war construction and the late-twentieth century critique of national income. KEYWORDS: System of National Accounts, Phyllis Deane, feminist economics, Marilyn Waring, Richard Stone, African economic history, Benjamin Platt, national income accounting Introduction In the wake of the devastating 2008 financial crisis and a recovery whose benefits were not widely shared, a commission chaired by the economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi delivered a thoroughgoing critique of both the methods and the uses of national income accounting. ‘GDP mainly measures market production, though it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indicators about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions.’1 1. Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives. View all notes This paper will demonstrate that such critiques are long-standing, and have been made with particular persistence by female economists concerned about the invisibility of women’s work. The historiography of national income accounting has grown in recent years. Timothy Mitchell pointed to Keynes’s early employment in British India as a key influence in creation of ‘the economy’ as a ‘self-contained object whose “problems” could be measured, analyzed, and addressed as a form of knowledge that appears to stand outside the object and grasp it in its entirety’.2 2. Mitchell, Rule of Experts. View all notes Mary Morgan has examined the uncertainty that attended the application of national income accounting to the colonies; she argued that much of the epistemic discord can be attributed to disciplinary differences between economics and anthropology.3 3. Morgan, ‘Seeking Parts’. View all notes Daniel Speich, Michael Ward and Diane Coyle chronicled the postwar globalisation of national income accounting.4 4. Speich, ‘Travelling with the GDP’; Ward, Quantifying the World; Coyle, GDP. View all notes Morten Jerven has explored both the decisions about accounting methods in some newly independent African states and the systematic dearth of information African statisticians have had to use as the basis for national income estimates.5 5. Jerven, Poor Numbers; Jerven, ‘Users and Producers’. View all notes Yet the role of female economists as both ambivalent founders and radical critics of the methods of national income accounting has not been fully appreciated. Nor has the historiography adequately explored the centrality of ‘women’s work’ to critical writings on the methods of national income accounting. Drawing upon the archives of the United Nations Statistical Office, the UK National Archives, the Malawi National Archives, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Richard Stone Papers at the University of Cambridge, this paper argues that feminist economists and women’s work were central to both the postwar construction and the late-twentieth century critique of national income. Phyllis Deane and Marilyn Waring, though perhaps not widely known outside the community of national income accountants, were anything but marginal figures. Deane compiled the earliest ‘national’ income calculations in all of Africa, and helped Richard Stone—who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics—to universalise his method. As a young economic researcher working under Stone’s supervision, Deane grappled with the conceptual difficulties involved in measuring the ‘national’ incomes of mostly rural subsistence economies in British colonial Africa. In constructing her estimates, Deane relied heavily on a multidisciplinary survey of nutrition and agricultural practices conducted a decade earlier in Nyasaland. Much of the data in this survey had been collected by a female anthropologist and a female nutritionist. Deane’s work was essentially an exercise in reductionism and bounding; she sought to extract from this intensive survey a single estimate of aggregate production. Yet Deane broke with her advisor’s favoured convention that activities not involved in market exchange should be excluded from estimates of national income. Though Stone eventually succeeded in making his preferred methodology—which excluded most household labour from national income—the global standard, later critics echoed Deane’s early work in questioning the assumptions that underpinned indices (the Gross National Product and, later, the Gross Domestic Product) with growing power in international discourse. By the 1980s, the reform of national income accounting methods had become a feminist cause. Marilyn Waring argued first for the imputation of unpaid household labour in national income and later for alternative methods, particularly time-use surveys. Her proposals demanded some of the same methods as the nutrition surveys that had served as the substrate for initial calculations of colonial national income. Thus, between the interwar period and the close of the twentieth century, methods of measuring human welfare had come full circle. This paper will proceed in four parts. The first section chronicles the nutrition survey that amassed the data later used to compile Africa’s first national income estimate. This section highlights the intensive, multidisciplinary methods used to measure human welfare, as well as the survey’s concern for inter-personal, inter-temporal and gendered differences in nutritional status and well-being. The next section recounts Deane’s searching critique of her own national income estimates, as she struggled to reconcile the reductionism required to compile the accounts and the realities of quotidian life that such simplification obscured. The third section demonstrates how Deane’s critiques were silenced with the rise of modernisation theory, as national income—and its main index, Gross National Product—became the hegemonic barometer of human welfare and human progress. In 1953 and 1968, almost entirely male expert committees prepared manuals for national income accountants around the globe. Known as the United Nations Systems of National Accounts, these manuals advised accountants to exclude most household and subsistence labour. Finally, the fourth section documents the broader reconsideration of the importance of non-monetary, female-dominated production activities that began during the 1970s. Feminist activists and scholars, and particularly Waring, played a central role in the resuscitation, and radical extension, of Phyllis Deane’s early postwar critiques of national income. Amassing a Multivariate Data Set: The Nyasaland Nutrition Survey In the years leading up to the Second World War, British Nyasaland (Malawi) was the site of an ambitious study meant to inform future interventions. In 1937, the UK Economic Advisory Council established a Committee on Nutrition, which announced plans to support a series of multi-disciplinary nutritional surveys in colonial territories throughout the empire.6 6. Berry, Before the Wind of Change. View all notes Nyasaland’s governor, Harold Kittermaster, made it known that he was eager to have a study conducted among his subjects, and in March 1937 the governors of the East African territories—who had been tasked with selecting the site for the first such investigation—granted his wish.7 7. Brantley, Feeding Families, 4–5. View all notes The Nyasaland Nutritional Survey began in three villages in Nkhotakota district in September 1938, under the leadership of Benjamin Stanley Platt. Though only in his mid-thirties, Platt was already a physician and biochemist of considerable repute. He had spent the previous six years in Shanghai, where he had conducted controlled trials that confirmed the link between thiamine (Vitamin B1) deficiency, rice preparation and the symptoms of beriberi.8 8. Carpenter, Beriberi. View all notes The survey team included another doctor, H. G. Fitzmaurice, who had been the medical officer stationed in Nkhotakota for two years when the survey began. Fitzmaurice and his successor, W. T. C. Berry, were tasked with examining all the adults in the three villages using Platt’s 10-page examination form, and periodically weighing the infants and young children.9 9. Brantley, Feeding Families, 7–9. View all notes For the team’s nutritionist, Platt chose Jessie Barker, a young researcher already based in Nyasaland who had worked on nutrition surveys in the UK.10 10. Unlike most of the male members of the team (e.g. Fitzmaurice, Platt, Berry and Kettlewell), Barker and Read were not members of the Colonial Service when they joined the survey team. Yet they were both well-established scholars already working in Nyasaland. Read had been awarded a research fellowship by the International African Institute to study the impact of male migrant labour on the women and children who remained in Nyasaland. Barker had been in Nyasaland for over a year before the start of the survey, after having worked in the United Kingdom on urban surveys for the famed nutrition researcher John Boyd Orr. See Berry, Before the Wind of Change, 96. Also see Whitehead, ‘Read, Margaret Helen’. View all notes Her task was to record the weights of all food before cooking and as consumed, and to pack samples to be sent to a laboratory in Aberdeen for biochemical analysis. Barker’s nickname in the villages was Mwadya chiyani (Chichewa for ‘What have you eaten’) due to the frequency with which she asked the question.11 11. Brantley, Feeding Families, 9. View all notes The team’s anthropologist, Margaret Read, would study the impact of social organisation on nutrition.12 12. Ibid., 4–5. View all notes Richard Kettlewell, an official in Nyasaland’s Department of Agriculture, was the team’s agriculturalist. The final expert on the survey team was Geoffrey Herklots, an economic biologist whom Platt had met at the University of Hong Kong.13 13. Ibid., 10. View all notes For their part, the Africans who were to be the focus of the study were promised exemption from the hut tax for the duration of the study.14 14. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers. View all notes Early results from this survey soon revealed the complexity of nutritional problems in Nyasaland. In Shanghai, Platt’s studies of beriberi had suggested that simple thiamine supplements, or slight alterations in the preparation of rice, could ameliorate a common biochemical deficiency. But, to Platt’s surprise, medical examinations in the villages revealed not a single clear case of any deficiency disease—no beriberi, no scurvy, no pellagra—known to be amenable to cure with a specific vitamin or mineral.15 15. Brantley, Feeding Families, 107. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers, 13. View all notes Platt’s dreams of another a silver-bullet nutritional cure would go unrealised. Still, the survey data were rich. Disaggregated by age and sex and collected over ten months, this trove proved sufficient to establish that, although the villagers did not exhibit florid deficiencies of any particular micronutrient, many suffered from what one physician on the team called ‘seasonal semi-starvation’. Using data from studies of Europeans, Platt assumed a basal metabolic rate (the rate of calorie usage during sleeping), as well as metabolic rates associated with a number of activities (harvesting maize, weeding, etc.) for both men and women.16 16. Brantley, Feeding Families, 100. View all notes Drawing upon the team’s fieldwork studies of time devoted by their subjects to specific types of labour, Platt estimated the number of calories required to meet energy needs. Seeking to compare caloric needs to caloric consumption, Platt used as representative samples Barker’s records of the amounts and kinds of food eaten in a number of survey households, then multiplied these tallies of food consumption by the per-unit calorie figures for each kind of food that she had sent for biochemical analysis. Platt used weighted averages of the population by age and sex to offer a single figure comparing calorie requirements to calorie consumption for each village in each month between December 1938 and September 1939.17 17. Ibid., 71–73. View all notes The data revealed that in each village there were months in which consumption did not meet requirements. The ‘energy deficit’ could be astounding; in the maize-growing village of Jere in January 1939, a period during the growing season that demanded long days pulling weeds even as granaries containing the 1938 harvest began to run short, calorie intake was 28.5 per cent below calorie requirements.18 18. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers, 138. View all notes Though the survey failed to prove its original hypothesis—that the main nutritional problems were specific micronutrient deficiencies—the methods of data collection and analysis allowed the surveyors to demonstrate inter-temporal variations in nutritional status. In her book on the history of British colonial nutrition research, Cynthia Brantley focused on the reductionism that went into crafting these comparisons of energy production and consumption, noting that a number of the major tables did not disaggregate on the basis of age or sex. But in other figures Platt’s survey did indeed disaggregate. This was evident in a graph charting the average numbers of hours that men and women devoted to work throughout the survey in each village (Figure 1). This graph focused on agricultural labour, and did not include some major categories of ‘women’s work’, such as cooking, grinding corn and sweeping the home (though these were tabulated elsewhere in the survey data). The graph also provided a somewhat unrepresentative picture of the male contribution to the family farm, as the exemption from the hut tax for the study villages resulted in fewer men leaving in search of waged labour to pay the tax. Despite these shortcomings, the time-use graph involved far less reductionism than GDP per capita, which became the global standard measure of welfare in the decades following his survey. Figure 1. Time-use survey showing average number of hours of work per individual per working day. Courtesy of Library & Archives Service, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Catalogue Ref. No. GB 0809–Nut 02/04/11. Source: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Archives, GB 0809–Nut 02/04/11. Display full size Phyllis Deane and the Hesitant Birth of a Method Platt never published a final report on the survey. Seconded to London at the start of the Second World War, he deposited the papers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine without ever fully analysing the data. But the survey had a surprising legacy. The data formed the basis of Africa’s first ‘colonial national income’ estimate. Though the survey was not originally intended for use in the Meade-Stone method of national income calculation (indeed, the 1941 paper that established this method had not yet been published when the survey was completed), an economic researcher named Phyllis Deane would make use of the survey while operating within the Meade-Stone framework. In the years following the Second World War, the economists responsible for the development of this system of national income accounting sought to expand the use of their new tool around the globe. In the earnest spirit of the postwar dawn, they hoped this new technology would aid in the reconstruction of Europe and in a rapid increase in living standards among colonised peoples. In many ways their dream would come to fruition; national income accounting, and especially its final aggregate measure of production (the gross national product), quickly became a universal centrepiece of economic policy. Though they would later become a staple of peacetime economic policy-making, the methods of national income accounting were devised in the middle of war. In the opening years of the war, British planners sought to survey Britain’s wartime production. In a 1940 pamphlet titled How to Pay for the War, John Maynard Keynes made some initial attempts to measure the magnitude of production.19 19. Keynes, How to Pay. View all notes That same year James Meade and Richard Stone, both students of economics at Cambridge during the 1930s, were invited to join the Central Economic Intelligence Staff of the War Cabinet Offices ‘to undertake the task of measuring the national income and its composition’.20 20. Robinson, ‘Foreword, v. View all notes In its state of total mobilisation, the United Kingdom could ill afford bottlenecks and shortages; an up-to-date and comprehensive picture of the national economy could help keep wartime production on course. It was appropriate that, when Stone and Meade published their method of national income accounting in 1941, they would choose The Economic Journal, a publication edited by Keynes.21 21. Meade and Stone, ‘The Construction of Tables’. View all notes Their method was well-suited to the prescriptions Keynes had articulated in 1936 in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.22 22. Keynes, The General Theory. View all notes In this, his magnum opus, Keynes had argued that fiscal and monetary policy could (and should) be used to increase effective demand in the face of economic downturns. This approach demanded accurate, comprehensive and recent macro-economic statistics for analysis and policy response. Stone and Meade’s method was, then, a product of Keynes’s prescriptions for both the Great Depression and war mobilisation. Stone and Meade’s method of national income accounting was not without forerunners. Political economists including William Petty (1664)23 23. Petty, Verbum Sapienti. View all notes and François Quesnay (1758)24 24. Quesnay, Tableau Économique. View all notes had devised various statistical methods for measuring aggregate production or income. During the early decades of the twentieth century other economists and statisticians in the United States and in Europe, including Bowley and Stamp (1927),25 25. Bowley and Stamp, ‘The National Income, 1924’, 376–78. View all notes Clark (1932),26 26. Clark, The National Income, 1924–31. View all notes Kuznets (1934)27 27. Kuznets, National Income, 1929–1932. View all notes and Lindahl, Dahlgren and Kock (1937)28 28. Lindahl, Dahlgren and Kock, National Income of Sweden. View all notes had published their own studies of national income. Yet Meade and Stone’s method would be become a global standard, in part because of its perceived rigour. While other measures of the national income involved the aggregation of either production figures or income statistics, Meade and Stone demanded equality in the final tally of three separate columns: income, output and expenditure. In their 1941 article, Meade and Stone presented their work as a tool not only for economic planning in a single country, but also as a universal method capable of comparing nations and imperial holdings around the globe.29 29. Meade and Stone, ‘The Construction of Tables’, 216. View all notes In 1941 Stone, Meade and their colleague Austin Robinson had approached the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), an independent economic research institute in London established in 1938, with a proposal to fund ‘a suitable research worker who might attempt the task of measuring certain colonial incomes’.30 30. Robinson, ‘Foreword’, v. View all notes The NIESR accepted the proposal. For this position the economists chose Phyllis Deane, a 23-year-old recent graduate in history and economics from the University of Glasgow.31 31. The wartime mobilisation had generated a demand for trained economists, lowering (at least temporarily) the barriers women faced in securing important posts in economic research institutions: another young female investigator, Phyllis Ady, held a fellowship from the Colonial Research Council to measure the national income of the Gold Coast. Fortes, Steel and Ady, ‘Ashanti Survey, 1945–46’, 149–77. View all notes Deane’s work was to proceed in two steps: first she would compile estimates using sources available in London; later, she would refine the estimates through fieldwork. The project was, according to Austin Robinson (who, along with Richard Stone and (later) W. Arthur Lewis, would serve on Deane’s Advisory Committee), ‘an experiment’ in the application of the techniques of national income accounting to the British colonies.32 32. Robinson, ‘Foreword’, v. View all notes Deane and her advisors chose Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) and Nyasaland (today’s Malawi) for the study; Jamaica was added later. Robinson wrote that the team chose Northern Rhodesia because ‘we thought, perhaps wrongly, that it was a relatively simple territory with which to start’. He did not elaborate on why this territory was particularly ‘simple’, though he mentioned he had worked on studies of the territory and knew where to find relevant statistical material. Robinson explained further that Nyasaland had been chosen precisely because of the availability of Platt’s survey data, which could be used to estimate subsistence agricultural production as well as native incomes and consumption.33 33. Ibid., vii–viii. Robinson also explained that the geographic contiguity of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland also seemed to present the opportunity for cross-checking individual estimates. Aside from the survey data, Deane relied on data provided in written correspondence with officials and settlers in the colonies. View all notes Deane was quick to recognise the irony of using the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey data for Africa’s earliest national incomes, given the vastly different understandings of society that each set of metrics entailed. After compiling initial estimates of the ‘national’ income of Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Jamaica from her desk in London, Deane expressed profound uncertainty about the use of a method designed for the metropolitan United Kingdom in territories where the great majority of production was never exchanged for money.34 34. A seemingly arbitrary substitution of ‘colony’ and ‘nation’ is evident throughout Deane’s writings on national income accounting in colonial settings. View all notes In her searching critiques of the Meade-Stone method, the tenet most in need of revision was the notion that goods produced within a household and not exchanged on the market should be excluded.35 35. Deane, Measurement of Colonial Incomes, 20–21. View all notes This understanding of the ‘production boundary’—that is, the distinction between production included in aggregate estimates and production left out of it— was fairly well established in earlier methods of national income accounting.36 36. As the economist Arthur Cecil Pigou famously quipped in 1920, ‘if a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished’. See Pigou, Economics of Welfare. View all notes But, even in industrialised nations, the exclusion of (mostly female) household non-monetary production was not without controversy. Historian Nancy Folbre has chronicled the protests of women’s groups and a few statisticians against the nineteenth-century transformation of married women in the United States census from productive labourers to economic ‘dependants’.37 37. These women’s groups and a few male statisticians argued (unsuccessfully) that married women working in family enterprises or providing domestic services were ‘occupied’, and that their classification as dependants helped justify lower wages. Much of the impetus for this change came from the mid-nineteenth-century ‘cult of domesticity’ (which banished the logic of economic interest from the moral realm of the home), the rise in male labour outside the household and the insistence of male trade unionists on their roles as the family’s sole breadwinners. Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife’, 463–84. View all notes By the time Deane began to publish her thoughts on the production boundary in the late 1940s, economic statisticians in Scandinavia and the United States had already sought to measure the value of ‘housewives’ services’, often for the purpose of inclusion in national accounts.38 38. Goldschmidt-Clermont, ‘Economic Measurement’, 279–99. View all notes In the colonies, where non-monetary production was more significant, the standard production boundary seemed, to a number of economic statisticians, untenable. In an estimate of the national income in Nigeria by Alan Prest and Ian Stewart published in 1953, the authors used a production boundary in which all intra-household transfers were included. Perhaps because the Prest-Stewart method seemed such a radical departure, it was not widely adopted.39 39. Prest and Stewart, National Income of Nigeria. View all notes Though Deane did not extend the production boundary as far as Prest and Stewart, she insisted that the then-standard rule of excluding most of women’s household labour was untenable in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. Most of the labour for the basic unit of production, the family, is supplied by the woman. She does most of the recurrent agricultural work, most of the planting, the weeding, the fetching and carrying, the routine harvest work and the preparation of food.40 40. Deane, Colonial Social Accounting. View all notes Deane knew that including subsistence agricultural production in national income would be fairly uncontroversial, but she wondered how far the boundary should be expanded. Which of the activities of African women, for instance, in cultivating the soil, in grinding the corn, in cooking and otherwise preparing the food, in collecting firewood or wild foods, and so on, should be included as part of economic activities to be measured, and which should be classified as ‘uneconomic activities’?41 41. Deane, Measurement of Colonial Incomes, 20–21. View all notes To include some of these ‘non-monetary’ activities, while including others, appeared to her entirely arbitrary. Deane’s solution to this problem was, in The Measurement of Colonial National Incomes (1948), determined less by principle than by the availability of data. ‘Practical considerations, dominated by the type of material available, determine the answers to many questions of this kind.’ For instance, Deane was able to estimate the value of the grinding of corn by calculating the difference between market prices for ground corn meal and unground ears of corn. But she chose not to impute prices for the collection of firewood or the cooking of food in rural areas because, even using the Nyasaland Survey papers, it was ‘impossible to evaluate the time taken’ for these activities.42 42. Ibid., 20–21. View all notes Nevertheless, Deane was clearly unsatisfied with this production boundary. In order to expand it, she spent years collecting data on the activities that had not been included in her initial estimates. As early as 1946, Deane wrote: If expediency is to determine the line between services that are and are not to be included, field research must be done. At present it seems illogical to exclude the value of women’s services in collecting firewood, preparing and cooking food, and so on, yet include their work on the land.43 43. Deane, ‘Measuring National Income’, 155. View all notes To remedy this problem, Deane spent 18 months in 1946–47 in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, collecting and compiling the datasets she thought necessary to estimate national income with a more inclusive production boundary. In this task she worked closely with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), a group of British anthropologists based in Northern Rhodesia.44 44. See Colonial Research Fellowships, Plans and Reports of Miss P.M. Deane on problems of national income measurement in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and South Africa, CO 927/17/4 and CO 927/17/5 (1946–1948), The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA). During these years, the broader mission of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute was to understand the impact of broader political and economic forces on village life. See Englund, ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations’, 33–50. View all notes First she adapted for her own use a village budget survey first developed by the RLI anthropologist Godfrey Wilson.45 45. Deane, ‘National Income’, 34. View all notes Then she used this survey at RLI field sites in Nyasaland (with Clyde Mitchell) and Northern Rhodesia (with Elizabeth Colson and John Barnes). Though she wished she could recapitulate the methodology of the 1938 Nyasaland Nutrition Survey, Deane acknowledged that she possessed neither the staff nor the time to collect time-use data with the same intensity.46 46. Deane, ‘Problems of Surveying’, 44. View all notes Still, she believed that by interviewing a random sample of villagers about production and consumption habits, she could amass sufficient information to make ‘basic and reliable (though not accurate)’ estimates.47 47. ‘Village Economic Surveying in Central Africa’, Colonial Research Fellowships, Plans and Reports of Miss P. M. Deane, 28 Oct. 1948, CO 927/17/5, TNA. View all notes The result of this fieldwork was a book, published in 1953 and entitled Colonial Social Accounting, in which Deane used an expanded production boundary. Whereas her 1948 publication had not included estimates for firewood collection, her 1953 accounts did.48 48. Deane, Colonial Social Accounting, 281. View all notes In the 1953 accounts, Deane also included small-scale village industrial output by non-specialists (for instance, beer production by people whose were not primarily brewers). Deane did not place much faith in the accuracy of these estimates, which required ‘putting quantitative interpretations on qualitative observations.’49 49. Ibid., 262. View all notes But, after conducting fieldwork, she felt certain enough of the economic importance of these activities to include them in the national income. Deane hoped her estimates would be used to guide economic policies, with two ends in mind. ‘We start’, Deane explained, ‘from the assumption that for all communities an increase in the volume of economic goods and services produced, and an improvement in its distribution over time and among persons and groups, are important ends of economic policy.’50 50. Ibid., 120. View all notes Deane believed that, in order to address distributional concerns, the economic contributions of all producers and consumers, including rural African women in Britain’s colonies, should be counted. National Income Reigns Supreme One of the most remarkable aspects of Deane’s decisions is how widely they diverged from those of her adviser, Richard Stone. To see why Deane’s work was such a problem for Stone, it is first necessary to understand his postwar ambitions. By the war’s end, the impending demobilisation of millions of soldiers and idling of productive capacity—as well as the destruction wrought by war—made economic growth in Europe seem imperative. Growth was also a need keenly felt in the Colonial Office. Labour strikes roiled the British West Indies and the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt during the 1930s and after the war burgeoning nationalist movements throughout the empire demanded self-determination. In response, the Colonial Office adopted the rhetoric of ‘development’ as the postwar apology for imperial rule.51 51. Cooper, Africa since 1940; Constantine, Making of British Colonial Development Policy. View all notes Stone and Robinson argued that the development project could be guided by the comprehensive map of colonial economies that their method provided.52 52. The Cambridge economists could be quite effusive in describing the virtues of their method of national income accounting. When Deane’s preliminary report was published in 1948, Austin Robinson wrote of the utility and moral necessity of colonial accounting: ‘To my mind,’ he explained, ‘an estimate of the national income is the necessary beginning of a serious economic study of any country … What do we really know today about the standards of life of the millions in the colonial empire for whose welfare we are responsible?’ Robinson, ‘Foreword’, x. View all notes In the postwar international agencies that propounded global standards for an array of political and economic activities, Stone secured platforms from which to promote his tool. In 1945, he chaired a Subcommittee on National Income Statistics within the League of Nations Committee of Statistical Experts. In a 1945 letter to Stone, Director of the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Organization Alexander Loveday explained that his organisation was particularly eager to have a single global standard for national income measurement because it would enable a systematic apportionment of dues among member states.53 53. Alexander Loveday, Letter to Richard Stone, 14 June 1945, JRNS 5/1, King’s College Library, University of Cambridge. View all notes The subcommittee’s report, authored by Stone and published in 1947 (under the imprint of the now-defunct League with the aid of the United Nations), pointed to a rapidly growing literature on national income accounting in ‘economically less developed countries’, including studies in India and Palestine as well as Deane’s work in the West Indies and central Africa. The report promoted Stone and Meade’s system over those used by other economists.54 54. ‘Measurement of National Income.’ View all notes Stone continued to globalise his method in 1953, when he oversaw the United Nations Statistical Office publication of the first System of National Accounts and Supporting Tables (SNA). This document provided detailed standards for national accounts and made special reference to non-monetary transactions in ‘underdeveloped’ settings.55 55. System of National Accounts, 1953. View all notes Because Stone’s committee sought a universal method, the production boundary set out in the 1953 SNA differed sharply from the one Deane used in Colonial Social Accounting. The SNA explained that its production boundary sought to include ‘household activities that are clearly akin to those which are usually undertaken in enterprises and the exclusion of those for which the analogy with enterprises becomes tenuous’.56 56. Ibid. View all notes This boundary included ‘primary production’—that is, ‘agriculture, forestry, hunting, fishing, mining and quarrying’—whether exchanged on the market or used for a household’s own consumption. The SNA diverged most significantly from Deane’s production boundary in its exclusion of ‘all non-primary production performed by producers outside of their own trades and consumed by themselves’. This meant that much of the beer production and small-scale manufacture (e.g. weaving of mats) included in Deane’s estimates was excluded from estimates prepared according to the SNA.57 57. Ibid., 5. View all notes To Stone and the members of the expert groups devising the SNA, the imperative for international comparability of national income estimates demanded strict limitations on the production boundary.58 58. In later writings, Richard and Giovanna Stone offered a more pragmatic reason for the SNA’s exclusion of ‘household and amateur activities’. They explained: ‘This treatment is not a matter of principle but convenience … Attempts to extend the production boundary by valuing household and amateur activities come up against an almost complete lack of information.’ This is the same problem that Deane had encountered in making her own estimates of colonial national income, and was the impetus for her field studies in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. But, whereas Deane (and later Marilyn Waring) saw this lack of data as a fundamental problem in national income that demanded immediate remedy, Richard and Giovanna Stone presented it more as a curiosity to be solved at some later date. Stone and Stone, National Income and Expenditure, 30–31. View all notes One possible explanation for the exclusion of ‘women’s work’ in international standards of national income was the almost complete absence of women on the expert committees devising them. The nine-member 1947 Sub-Committee on National Income Statistics at the League of Nations, which met in Princeton, NJ, for four days in December 1945, included one woman: Hildegarde Kneeland, a representative of the Inter-American Statistical Institute.59 59. League of Nations Committee of Statistical Experts. Report of the Sub-Committee on National Income Statistics. Princeton, NJ, JRNS 5/1, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge, April 1946. Another woman, Miss Agatha Chapman, economist on the staff of the Bank of Canada, was present and participated in the discussions, but she was not a member of the sub-committee. View all notes The five-person Expert Group responsible for the 1953 SNA included no women at all. And the ten-member Expert Group charged with revising the SNA in 1968 included only one woman, Margaret Mód.60 60. System of National Accounts, 1993, xliv–xlv. View all notes Thus, the combined membership of the first three groups tasked with deciding on postwar national income methods was 8.3 per cent female, 91.7 per cent male (see Table 1). Table 1. Membership of committees devising international standards for national income (female members in italics). CSVDisplay Table As it happened, the two women on these committees were intensely interested in the epistemological blindness of metrics such as the Gross National Product. Beginning in the late 1920s, in her post at the United States Department of Agriculture, Hildegarde Kneeland published time-surveys of women’s work.61 61. Kneeland, ‘Women on Farms’. View all notes For her part, Margaret Mód’s research used household surveys to measure inequality.62 62. Mód, ‘Social Stratification in Hungary’. View all notes She was the principal author of a 1966 Expert Group report on income distribution statistics.63 63. ‘United Nations Statistical Commission, Report of the 14th Session’, 17, United Nations, New York, 1966, Box S-1003-0030, Folder 1, United Nations Archive and Records Management Section. View all notes Mód frequently argued that national statistical offices should publish both a ‘national account—picturing the economy’ and a ‘social account—representing society’. While the national account would allow for the calculation of the GNP, the social account would demonstrate—both ‘in value terms’ and ‘in their actual natural appearance’—a variety of demographic, manpower and social statistics, disaggregated ‘according to income-types and population groups’.64 64. Mód, ‘Relation’, 129–31. View all notes It was no coincidence, then, that the 1968 SNA—which, unlike the 1953 SNA, included Mód—proposed a more expansive production boundary. The authors of the 1953 report had admitted that a ‘comprehensive system’ that included unpaid household labour and analysed the distribution of income might be preferable. Still, they argued, such a system was ‘hardly possible at the present time’.65 65. The 1953 SNA argued it was impractical to devise a more complex and comprehensive means of measuring national income: ‘The actual construction of such a comprehensive accounting system is hardly possible at the present time. Nor, given the practical needs and resources, should it be the immediate objective of economic statisticians engaged in this field.’ System of National Accounts, 1953. View all notes The production boundary in the 1953 SNA excluded non-primary products of primary producers (e.g. beer brewed by farmers). The 1968 revision, on the other hand, allowed for the inclusion of non-monetary building and construction work, as well as ‘home processing of primary commodities such as brewing beer, making furniture, and spinning or weaving textiles’.66 66. Blades, ‘Subsistence Activities’, 391–410. View all notes In the years after 1953, it was not altogether clear which production boundary—Stone’s restrictive one or Deane’s more expansive one—would prove more popular among national accountants. During the 1960s, as newly independent African states began to compile their own national income accounts, the status of non-monetary output remained unsettled. Morten Jerven has documented how in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, national income methods were revised after independence to include hut construction and rent.67 67. Jerven, ‘Users and Producers’, 180. View all notes In Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia, another newly independent nation led by a leftist leader with an ideological commitment to the nation’s peasantry, post-independence national income accounts also included a number of categories of non-monetary production.68 68. Ibid., 178. View all notes Even though the exclusion of such production might have allowed for the appearance of higher post-independence rates of growth (assuming, as development economists predicted, that non-monetary production would give way to monetary exchange), these governments found greater ideological consistency in rendering the peasantry bureaucratically visible.69 69. Ibid., 180. View all notes At the same time, maximising GNP growth was, to many politicians and officials in new nations, the singular and indisputable aim of economic policy. And, in this quest for growth, development economists and officials considered non-monetary production both insignificant and backward, a distraction from the central task of expanding large-scale agriculture and manufacturing.70 70. The devaluation of non-monetary production in the SNA found allies in prominent modernisation theorists like Arthur Lewis, who argued in 1954 that the central dynamic of development involved moving subsistence farmers into industrial production. Incompletely captured or undervalued subsistence production led national income to rise simply as a result of the (much-prophesied) transition from non-monetary to monetary production without any increase in real aggregate production. According to Daniel Speich, by the early 1960s many of the ascendant modernisation theorists providing technical assistance on national income around the world argued that ‘it did not really matter whether the instrument visualised economic growth or merely market integration, as both processes were thought to be intrinsic to development’. See Speich, ‘Traveling with the GDP’; Lewis, ‘Economic Development’, 139–91. View all notes National income, as measured by the SNA methodology, was in this era the ultimate arbiter of progress. In an opening address to the 1964 meeting of the SNA Expert Group, UN Under-Secretary for Economic and Social Development Philippe de Seynes exulted that national accounts were being used to determine whether or not member nations were meeting the UN’s target of 5 per cent annual growth.71 71. SNA Expert Group Meeting, Notes, 2 Dec. 1964, JRNS 5/3, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge.. View all notes Four years later, while serving as director of Census and Statistics in Malawi (the post-independence name of the former Nyasaland), a recent Oxford graduate named Derek Blades published the first national income estimates for the new nation. In his report he equated aggregate measures of national income with human welfare. The simplest indicator of economic progress of a community is the movement of real income per head of the population. This is not an unqualified measure of improvements in the standard of living for the average inhabitant of a country but has been found a useful guide.72 72. Malawi National Accounts Report, 1964-67, 7, Government of Malawi, Zomba, 1968, Malawi National Archives.. View all notes Thus, even in Malawi, once the site of a globally recognised, multi-disciplinary study of nutrition and welfare, aggregate production had come to be understood as the singular indicator of human flourishing. The Feminist Critique of National Income’s Methods and Uses This consensus on the primacy of growth in the monetary sector began to break in the early 1970s, as the production boundary began face serious critique both inside and outside the community of economic statisticians. Powerful voices and agencies in international development called for a renewed focus on non-monetary production in general and unpaid female labour in particular. While this change in focus would not immediately refashion international standards for national income accounting, it would lead a number of governments to reconsider production boundaries in their own statistics. The singular focus on aggregate production growth during the 1960s gave rise to a backlash from multiple quarters by the 1970s. Environmentalists decried the epistemic blindness of an accounting system that treated resource extraction (no matter how unsustainable) as simply another line item for income.73 73. For a sense of the environmental debate over the SNA during the 1970s, see Drechsler, ‘Problems of Recording’, 239–52. For a longer history of this discourse, see Hecht, ‘National Environmental Accounting’, 3–66. View all notes Prominent economists questioned the assumption that aggregate growth would necessarily benefit the lives of the poor.74 74. Konkel, ‘Monetization of Global Poverty’, 276–300. Konkel demonstrates that this was not a sudden rupture, but instead a gradual shift. View all notes One of the most famous criticisms came at a conference in New Delhi in 1969, when Dudley Seers of the University of Sussex argued that economic growth and social development had been conflated, and called for a shift in focus from aggregate production to measures of ‘poverty, unemployment, and inequality’.75 75. Seers, ‘What Are We Trying to Measure?’ View all notes The effects of such proposals began to be visible within international development institutions within a few years. By the end of the 1970s, the United States Agency for International Development and the World Bank had both adopted the International Labour Organization’s call for a ‘basic needs’ approach. This understanding of development treated aggregate production growth not as an end in itself, but as a means toward ensuring that even the poorest people in poor countries could obtain adequate food, housing and education.76 76. Kapur, Lewis and Webb, The World Bank, 215–30. Also see International Labour Office, Employment, Growth and Basic Needs. View all notes Some of the most radical critiques of regnant economic frameworks concerned the systematic devaluation of female labour. A popular feminist call for ‘Wages for Housework’ began with the Power of Women Collective in Italy and spread throughout Europe and North America. Silvia Federici argued that women’s work of social reproduction subsidised the costs of officially recognised, measured and mostly male ‘economic’ production. 77 77. Federici, Wages Against Housework. The resonance of this campaign might be attributable, in part, to rising rates of female labour-force participation in wealthy countries during this era. The burgeoning substitution of market transactions for previously unpaid household labour (laundry, child care, food preparation) might have helped to draw elite attention towards the value of such labour. See Presser, ‘Can We Make Time for Children?’, 523–43. View all notes The neo-Marxist economic anthropologist Claude Meillassoux argued that this disregard for social reproduction was part of a longer history of exploitation of (heavily female) subsistence labour under colonial capitalism.78 78. Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money. View all notes Danish economist Ester Boserup contended that the invisibility of women in economic indices led to development projects that adversely affected women’s lives.79 79. Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development. View all notes In this milieu, the exclusion of non-monetary production in national income accounts came under heightened scrutiny. Under the direction of Derek Blades, who had left Malawi in 1972, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) undertook a global survey of the treatment of non-monetary activities in the national accounts of developing countries.80 80. In this study, a ‘developing country’ was any country that received development aid from the members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. It included countries in Southern Europe while excluding poorer nations in the ‘communist bloc’. See Blades, Non-Monetary (Subsistence) Activities. View all notes Of the 65 national statistical offices that responded to the OECD’s questionnaire, 42 included non-monetary building; 28 included non-monetary handicrafts; and 25 included non-monetary food processing. Still, the SNA (even in its revised form) continued to exclude many important non-monetary activities. This exclusion had global consequences, as the United Nations aimed to ensure through its technical assistance programmes that ‘the developing countries’ used their ‘limited material and skill resources’ to produce ‘consistent and balanced systems of statistical information promoted by the United Nations standards’.81 81. ‘Report to the Economic and Social Council on the Fifteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, Held at the UN Headquarters from 28 February to 8 March 1968’, Draft, Statistical Commission, 5 March 1968, Box S-1003-0030, Folder 1, United Nations Archive and Records Management Section.. View all notes Indeed, many governments followed the UN’s lead in excluding important forms of unpaid labour from national accounts. For instance, Blades’ survey found that only six out of 65 respondents included non-monetary water porterage. This activity had not been included in the 1968 SNA production boundary, though it remained a ubiquitous and time-consuming activity in the lives of hundreds of millions of rural women.82 82. Blades, ‘Subsistence Activities’, 396. View all notes Feminists believed that the inclusion of unpaid household labour in national income statistics would have political consequences. For some advocates, the imputation of prices for such labour in the national income carried the useful implication that such activities should be paid. This ideological congruence between increased statistical visibility of women’s work and remuneration for uncompensated labour was most clearly articulated by the Wages for Housework movement. As Judith Ramirez, a prominent Canadian activist in the movement, declared in 1981, ‘The failure of the world’s economies to recognise the economic worth of women’s work has devastating consequences. Women receive only one-tenth of the world’s income though we perform two-thirds of the world’s work.’83 83. See, for instance, Ramirez, ‘The Global Kitchen’. View all notes The leaders of Wages for Housework rarely attacked the SNA specifically, but some scholars did pen such critiques. After a decade-long tenure as a member of parliament in New Zealand (1975–84), where she had served as chair of the Public Expenditure Committee, Marilyn Waring left politics to pursue a doctorate in political economy. In a book based on her dissertation, she claimed her time in government had convinced her that ‘the UNSNA is an essential tool of the male economic system … When international reports and writers refer to women as statistically or economically invisible, it is the UNSNA that has made it so.’84 84. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1988, 6, 39. View all notes Her remedy for the invisibility of women in economic indices was the wholesale imputation of monetary values to ‘unpaid work, productive and reproductive’, so as to ‘make this work visible, influencing policies and concepts, and questioning values’.85 85. Ibid., 5–6. View all notes One of the most prominent and persistent critics of the SNA was Robert Eisner, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who served on the editorial board of the journal Feminist Economics. Eisner had long argued that the System of National Accounts had major blind spots not only in the Global South, but also in advanced market economies. He advocated the inclusion of unpaid labour services in the home, estimating that, even in the United States where the share of such labour was relatively low, its inclusion would increase the 1992 GDP by one-third.86 86. Eisner had made similar proposals in academic papers since the 1970s. See Eisner, Misunderstood Economy, 21–25. For his earlier work, see Eisner, ‘Total Incomes’, 41–70. View all notes In its 1993 revision, the authors of the SNA felt compelled to answer critics such as Waring and Eisner.87 87. Joann Vanek, former director of social statistics at the United Nations, believes Waring’s influence stemmed from the detail of her critique: ‘She demystified the national accounts. Many feminists had taken pot shots at national accounts, but Marilyn went into the body of it and disaggregated the specific assumptions that were made and how that really shaped what ended up being a bias against women.’ See Terje, ‘Women Unaccounted For’. View all notes The 1993 report rebuffed the contention that unpaid domestic work should be included in main national income estimates. But, as a compromise, the authors suggested that household production of ‘domestic and personal services for own final consumption’ (e.g. ‘cleaning’, ‘preparation and serving of meals’, ‘care, training and instruction of children’, ‘care of sick, infirm, or old people’) might be included in a ‘satellite account’.88 88. System of National Accounts, 1993, 6.19, 6.20, 21.46, 21.47. In a letter to Stone Nancy Ruggles, Secretary of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, explained that Derek Blades was one of the earliest participants in planning for the next iteration of the SNA. The letter does not, however, explain Blades’ ideas for the production boundary. See Nancy Ruggles, Letter to Richard Stone, 27 July 1985, JRNS 5/6, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge. View all notes By bracketing off such production, the satellite account would not threaten the comparability of historical statistics of national income that were used to measure growth over time.89 89. Goldschmidt-Clermont and Pagnossin-Aligisakis, ‘Households’ non-SNA Production’, 519–29. View all notes Many feminists sought to ensure that such satellite accounts became a regular feature of national income accounting. In 1995 the International Women Count Network (a group coordinated by the Wages for Housework campaign) amassed the endorsements of 1,200 NGOs on a petition calling on governments to measure the value of the unpaid work of women in satellite accounts.90 90. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1999. View all notes ‘Only when women’s unwaged work is acknowledged and valued will women’s demands and needs be valued’, declared Ruth Todasco, a member of the network.91 91. Ibid., xxvii. Today many of the feminists who advocated ‘Wages for Housework’ in the 1970s are calling instead for a ‘basic citizens’ income’—an unconditional, non-means-tested payment from the state to every man, woman and child. For more political discourse on basic income in the Global South, see Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish. View all notes But Waring wanted to do more than add an appendix to national income estimates. In the 1988 edition of Counting for Nothing, she admitted that, in arguing for imputing values to women’s productive and reproductive labour, she had not simply aimed to improve the methodology of national income. Instead, she had hoped that, by demonstrating women’s heretofore uncounted and overwhelming contribution to national income, she would render the existing system of accounting ‘totally dysfunctional’.92 92. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1988, 233. View all notes She wished not to tinker with a hegemonic social statistic, but rather to overthrow it. By the late 1990s, Waring recanted her own recommendation to expand the production boundary. In the second edition of Counting for Nothing, published in 1999, Waring added an introduction in which she articulated her concerns about the political implications of adding women’s unpaid work to national income: Do we mean that we are comfortable with the care of children and the elderly, and our community-service work, sitting in the national accounting framework alongside … the production and storage of military weapons? What happens if the visibility we crave for policy purposes is established in such a framework, where all transactions are ‘goods,’ where there is no deficit side to the accounts, where whether or not an exchange is ‘good or worthy’ is immaterial? Won’t the great God of Growth still rule our lives?93 93. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1999, xxxi. View all notes By advocating the inclusion of women’s unpaid work in national income, Waring feared that she and other feminists risked advancing the idea that GDP maximisation should remain the central focus of economic policy. Waring sought a new epistemology, one that did not convert every activity into monetary units. She favoured an altogether different measure of welfare: time. Time was, she argued, a far more useful metric than gross national product. Time was ‘the common denominator of exchange’ and ‘the one investment we all have to make’. Time-use surveys could demonstrate, among other things, ‘which sex gets the menial, boring, low-status, and unpaid invisible work’, as well as ‘the interdependence of the activities of household members … how paid work, caring work, housework, community work, leisure, and time spent on personal care are interrelated’.94 94. Ibid. View all notes Analysis of these data would show, for instance, how cuts in social spending increased the burdens placed on women. It could demonstrate the benefits of simple yet often-overlooked interventions—such as efficient cooking stoves and accessible sources of clean water—that would lessen ‘non-economic’ drudgery for hundreds of millions of women around the globe. The data would, in short, allow for a less ambiguous evaluation of the benefits or harms wrought by policy than the imputation of values to unpaid labour. Though she did not explicitly discuss the history of colonial social science research methods, Waring was in essence calling for a return to the methods of the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey while expanding upon critiques articulated by Phyllis Deane in her early writings. Women’s work figured prominently in both Deane’s critique of the production boundary and Waring’s more totalising denunciation of the primacy of national income. Both Deane and Waring considered intensive field research crucial to rendering women’s work legible to policy-makers. Further still, both believed that the deficiencies of standard measures of national income were most obvious in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, in a 1995 documentary on her life, Marilyn Waring used a study of peasant women’s workdays in the low veld of Zimbabwe to describe the advantages of time-use surveys over measures of cash income.95 95. In contrast to the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey data (Figure 1), Waring’s time-use surveys invariably showed women spending more time on work than men. The disparity is explained in large part by the fact that Waring’s charts included time spent on cooking. See Who’s Counting? View all notes Female labour in rural southern Africa, then, was central both to an early critique of a mid-twentieth-century method of national income accounting and to a late-twentieth century proposal for a new economic measure to replace it. Conclusion The definition of ‘economic production’ may be buried in dry explanatory notes of government accounts and United Nations reports, but the esoteric facade masks a heated and ongoing political debate. In the latest iteration of the SNA, written in 2008, the authors try to respond to feminist critics. Defending the continued exclusion of many forms of non-monetary labour from the production boundary, the authors contended that such activities do not significantly impact inflation, deflation or other ‘disequilibria’ within the economy. Therefore, they asserted, national income accounts that included large non-monetary flows would be less useful for analysing such phenomena. As a compromise, the production boundary in the 2008 SNA included all production of goods (whether sold or not) but excluded the production of services for own use within the household.96 96. System of National Accounts, 2008, 6–7. The exceptions to the exclusion of services produced for household consumption are: ‘services produced by employing paid domestic staff’ and ‘the own-account production of housing services by owner-occupiers’. Perhaps because of the controversy surrounding the 1968 SNA revisions, the 1993 and 2008 revisions were not attributed to a specific ‘Expert Group’, but rather to an ‘Inter-Secretariat Working Group on National Accounts’ that ostensibly coordinated the input of a number of international organisations, including the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Statistical Division and regional commissions of the United Nations Secretariat, and the World Bank. Still, the ISWGNA did have ‘senior level representatives’ from each organisation. For the 2008 SNA, these were: Pieter Everaers and Laurs Norlund (Eurostat); Carol S. Carson and Robert Edwards (IMF); Enrico Giovannini (OECD), Willem de Vries and Paul Cheung (United Nations Statistical Division); Shaida Badiee (World Bank), 1. View all notes Because this definition continued to exclude most ‘personal and domestic services’, it did not satisfy critics.97 97. See, for instance, International Labour Office, ‘Statistics of Work’, 10. View all notes Even with its most recent revisions, national income remains a technology of aggregation. Even as it excludes some production, it sums the rest into a single annual index, thereby obscuring unequal inter-personal and seasonal distributions of production and consumption. Prominent voices in economics continue to articulate fundamental concerns about the conflation of aggregate production with human welfare. In 1990, in an effort ‘to shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people centered policies’, Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen launched the United Nations Development Programme’s first Human Development Report. Their new measure of human welfare, the Human Development Index (HDI), was a composite of life expectancy, adult literacy, school enrolment and a logarithmic transformation of per-capita income.98 98. Fukuda-Parr, ‘The Human Development Paradigm’, 301–17. View all notes The 1995 Human Development Report introduced the Gender Development Index (GDI), which used an ‘inequality aversion penalty’ that decreased HDI scores for gender disparities in any of the categories of the HDI.99 99. Klasen, ‘UNDP’s Gender-Related Measures’, 243–74. View all notes Meanwhile, calls to expand the production boundary to include ‘women’s work’ have moved from feminist treatises into the mainstream of economic commentary. This is nowhere clearer than in the 30 April 2016 edition of The Economist, which called for ‘the inclusion of unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives’, in ‘a new metric’ which the magazine called ‘GDP-plus’.100 100. ‘How to Measure Prosperity’. View all notes Whether GDP is to be revised or surpassed, improved measures of human welfare demand greater investments in the kinds of field surveys that arose in economic anthropology and nutrition research during the interwar era. At the impetus of the World Bank, collection of household survey data from poor countries has become progressively more systematic since the 1980s.101 101. Milanović, The Haves and the Have-Nots, 26. View all notes And, as chronicled above, the SNA has allowed for the inclusion of more forms of household and domestic labour in its more recent revisions. Still, the continued dearth of foreign assistance for data collection in poor countries keeps many nations from adding these activities to their national accounts. ‘There’s never the technical or logistical capacity to actually collect the data’, lamented Waring in a 2013 interview.102 102. Terje, ‘Women Unaccounted For’. View all notes Feminist visions for the future of economic statistics demand a return to social statistics that predate the globalisation of national income. Acknowledgements This paper has benefited from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the organisers of the Johns Hopkins African History Seminar, the 2014 annual meeting of the US African Studies Association, the 2016 New York Area African History Workshop and the Institute for New Economic Thinking Young Scholars’ Initiative, where earlier versions of portions of this paper were presented. Projit Mukharji, Steven Feierman, Mary Morgan, Jeremy Greene, Gerardo Serra, Jane Guyer, Rosanna Dent and Allegra Giovine provided helpful comments. The archivists at the Malawi National Archives, the UK National Archives, the University of Cambridge archives, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine archives and the archives of the United Nations Secretariat provided assistance in locating primary source materials. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes 1. Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives. 2. Mitchell, Rule of Experts. 3. Morgan, ‘Seeking Parts’. 4. Speich, ‘Travelling with the GDP’; Ward, Quantifying the World; Coyle, GDP. 5. Jerven, Poor Numbers; Jerven, ‘Users and Producers’. 6. Berry, Before the Wind of Change. 7. Brantley, Feeding Families, 4–5. 8. Carpenter, Beriberi. 9. Brantley, Feeding Families, 7–9. 10. Unlike most of the male members of the team (e.g. Fitzmaurice, Platt, Berry and Kettlewell), Barker and Read were not members of the Colonial Service when they joined the survey team. Yet they were both well-established scholars already working in Nyasaland. Read had been awarded a research fellowship by the International African Institute to study the impact of male migrant labour on the women and children who remained in Nyasaland. Barker had been in Nyasaland for over a year before the start of the survey, after having worked in the United Kingdom on urban surveys for the famed nutrition researcher John Boyd Orr. See Berry, Before the Wind of Change, 96. Also see Whitehead, ‘Read, Margaret Helen’. 11. Brantley, Feeding Families, 9. 12. Ibid., 4–5. 13. Ibid., 10. 14. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers. 15. Brantley, Feeding Families, 107. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers, 13. 16. Brantley, Feeding Families, 100. 17. Ibid., 71–73. 18. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers, 138. 19. Keynes, How to Pay. 20. Robinson, ‘Foreword, v. 21. Meade and Stone, ‘The Construction of Tables’. 22. Keynes, The General Theory. 23. Petty, Verbum Sapienti. 24. Quesnay, Tableau Économique. 25. Bowley and Stamp, ‘The National Income, 1924’, 376–78. 26. Clark, The National Income, 1924–31. 27. Kuznets, National Income, 1929–1932. 28. Lindahl, Dahlgren and Kock, National Income of Sweden. 29. Meade and Stone, ‘The Construction of Tables’, 216. 30. Robinson, ‘Foreword’, v. 31. The wartime mobilisation had generated a demand for trained economists, lowering (at least temporarily) the barriers women faced in securing important posts in economic research institutions: another young female investigator, Phyllis Ady, held a fellowship from the Colonial Research Council to measure the national income of the Gold Coast. Fortes, Steel and Ady, ‘Ashanti Survey, 1945–46’, 149–77. 32. Robinson, ‘Foreword’, v. 33. Ibid., vii–viii. Robinson also explained that the geographic contiguity of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland also seemed to present the opportunity for cross-checking individual estimates. Aside from the survey data, Deane relied on data provided in written correspondence with officials and settlers in the colonies. 34. A seemingly arbitrary substitution of ‘colony’ and ‘nation’ is evident throughout Deane’s writings on national income accounting in colonial settings. 35. Deane, Measurement of Colonial Incomes, 20–21. 36. As the economist Arthur Cecil Pigou famously quipped in 1920, ‘if a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished’. See Pigou, Economics of Welfare. 37. These women’s groups and a few male statisticians argued (unsuccessfully) that married women working in family enterprises or providing domestic services were ‘occupied’, and that their classification as dependants helped justify lower wages. Much of the impetus for this change came from the mid-nineteenth-century ‘cult of domesticity’ (which banished the logic of economic interest from the moral realm of the home), the rise in male labour outside the household and the insistence of male trade unionists on their roles as the family’s sole breadwinners. Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife’, 463–84. 38. Goldschmidt-Clermont, ‘Economic Measurement’, 279–99. 39. Prest and Stewart, National Income of Nigeria. 40. Deane, Colonial Social Accounting. 41. Deane, Measurement of Colonial Incomes, 20–21. 42. Ibid., 20–21. 43. Deane, ‘Measuring National Income’, 155. 44. See Colonial Research Fellowships, Plans and Reports of Miss P.M. Deane on problems of national income measurement in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and South Africa, CO 927/17/4 and CO 927/17/5 (1946–1948), The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA). During these years, the broader mission of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute was to understand the impact of broader political and economic forces on village life. See Englund, ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations’, 33–50. 45. Deane, ‘National Income’, 34. 46. Deane, ‘Problems of Surveying’, 44. 47. ‘Village Economic Surveying in Central Africa’, Colonial Research Fellowships, Plans and Reports of Miss P. M. Deane, 28 Oct. 1948, CO 927/17/5, TNA. 48. Deane, Colonial Social Accounting, 281. 49. Ibid., 262. 50. Ibid., 120. 51. Cooper, Africa since 1940; Constantine, Making of British Colonial Development Policy. 52. The Cambridge economists could be quite effusive in describing the virtues of their method of national income accounting. When Deane’s preliminary report was published in 1948, Austin Robinson wrote of the utility and moral necessity of colonial accounting: ‘To my mind,’ he explained, ‘an estimate of the national income is the necessary beginning of a serious economic study of any country … What do we really know today about the standards of life of the millions in the colonial empire for whose welfare we are responsible?’ Robinson, ‘Foreword’, x. 53. Alexander Loveday, Letter to Richard Stone, 14 June 1945, JRNS 5/1, King’s College Library, University of Cambridge. 54. ‘Measurement of National Income.’ 55. System of National Accounts, 1953. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 5. 58. In later writings, Richard and Giovanna Stone offered a more pragmatic reason for the SNA’s exclusion of ‘household and amateur activities’. They explained: ‘This treatment is not a matter of principle but convenience … Attempts to extend the production boundary by valuing household and amateur activities come up against an almost complete lack of information.’ This is the same problem that Deane had encountered in making her own estimates of colonial national income, and was the impetus for her field studies in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. But, whereas Deane (and later Marilyn Waring) saw this lack of data as a fundamental problem in national income that demanded immediate remedy, Richard and Giovanna Stone presented it more as a curiosity to be solved at some later date. Stone and Stone, National Income and Expenditure, 30–31. 59. League of Nations Committee of Statistical Experts. Report of the Sub-Committee on National Income Statistics. Princeton, NJ, JRNS 5/1, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge, April 1946. Another woman, Miss Agatha Chapman, economist on the staff of the Bank of Canada, was present and participated in the discussions, but she was not a member of the sub-committee. 60. System of National Accounts, 1993, xliv–xlv. 61. Kneeland, ‘Women on Farms’. 62. Mód, ‘Social Stratification in Hungary’. 63. ‘United Nations Statistical Commission, Report of the 14th Session’, 17, United Nations, New York, 1966, Box S-1003-0030, Folder 1, United Nations Archive and Records Management Section. 64. Mód, ‘Relation’, 129–31. 65. The 1953 SNA argued it was impractical to devise a more complex and comprehensive means of measuring national income: ‘The actual construction of such a comprehensive accounting system is hardly possible at the present time. Nor, given the practical needs and resources, should it be the immediate objective of economic statisticians engaged in this field.’ System of National Accounts, 1953. 66. Blades, ‘Subsistence Activities’, 391–410. 67. Jerven, ‘Users and Producers’, 180. 68. Ibid., 178. 69. Ibid., 180. 70. The devaluation of non-monetary production in the SNA found allies in prominent modernisation theorists like Arthur Lewis, who argued in 1954 that the central dynamic of development involved moving subsistence farmers into industrial production. Incompletely captured or undervalued subsistence production led national income to rise simply as a result of the (much-prophesied) transition from non-monetary to monetary production without any increase in real aggregate production. According to Daniel Speich, by the early 1960s many of the ascendant modernisation theorists providing technical assistance on national income around the world argued that ‘it did not really matter whether the instrument visualised economic growth or merely market integration, as both processes were thought to be intrinsic to development’. See Speich, ‘Traveling with the GDP’; Lewis, ‘Economic Development’, 139–91. 71. SNA Expert Group Meeting, Notes, 2 Dec. 1964, JRNS 5/3, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge.. 72. Malawi National Accounts Report, 1964-67, 7, Government of Malawi, Zomba, 1968, Malawi National Archives.. 73. For a sense of the environmental debate over the SNA during the 1970s, see Drechsler, ‘Problems of Recording’, 239–52. For a longer history of this discourse, see Hecht, ‘National Environmental Accounting’, 3–66. 74. Konkel, ‘Monetization of Global Poverty’, 276–300. Konkel demonstrates that this was not a sudden rupture, but instead a gradual shift. 75. Seers, ‘What Are We Trying to Measure?’ 76. Kapur, Lewis and Webb, The World Bank, 215–30. Also see International Labour Office, Employment, Growth and Basic Needs. 77. Federici, Wages Against Housework. The resonance of this campaign might be attributable, in part, to rising rates of female labour-force participation in wealthy countries during this era. The burgeoning substitution of market transactions for previously unpaid household labour (laundry, child care, food preparation) might have helped to draw elite attention towards the value of such labour. See Presser, ‘Can We Make Time for Children?’, 523–43. 78. Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money. 79. Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development. 80. In this study, a ‘developing country’ was any country that received development aid from the members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. It included countries in Southern Europe while excluding poorer nations in the ‘communist bloc’. See Blades, Non-Monetary (Subsistence) Activities. 81. ‘Report to the Economic and Social Council on the Fifteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, Held at the UN Headquarters from 28 February to 8 March 1968’, Draft, Statistical Commission, 5 March 1968, Box S-1003-0030, Folder 1, United Nations Archive and Records Management Section.. 82. Blades, ‘Subsistence Activities’, 396. 83. See, for instance, Ramirez, ‘The Global Kitchen’. 84. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1988, 6, 39. 85. Ibid., 5–6. 86. Eisner had made similar proposals in academic papers since the 1970s. See Eisner, Misunderstood Economy, 21–25. For his earlier work, see Eisner, ‘Total Incomes’, 41–70. 87. Joann Vanek, former director of social statistics at the United Nations, believes Waring’s influence stemmed from the detail of her critique: ‘She demystified the national accounts. Many feminists had taken pot shots at national accounts, but Marilyn went into the body of it and disaggregated the specific assumptions that were made and how that really shaped what ended up being a bias against women.’ See Terje, ‘Women Unaccounted For’. 88. System of National Accounts, 1993, 6.19, 6.20, 21.46, 21.47. In a letter to Stone Nancy Ruggles, Secretary of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, explained that Derek Blades was one of the earliest participants in planning for the next iteration of the SNA. The letter does not, however, explain Blades’ ideas for the production boundary. See Nancy Ruggles, Letter to Richard Stone, 27 July 1985, JRNS 5/6, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge. 89. Goldschmidt-Clermont and Pagnossin-Aligisakis, ‘Households’ non-SNA Production’, 519–29. 90. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1999. 91. Ibid., xxvii. Today many of the feminists who advocated ‘Wages for Housework’ in the 1970s are calling instead for a ‘basic citizens’ income’—an unconditional, non-means-tested payment from the state to every man, woman and child. For more political discourse on basic income in the Global South, see Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish. 92. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1988, 233. 93. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1999, xxxi. 94. Ibid. 95. In contrast to the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey data (Figure 1), Waring’s time-use surveys invariably showed women spending more time on work than men. The disparity is explained in large part by the fact that Waring’s charts included time spent on cooking. See Who’s Counting? 96. System of National Accounts, 2008, 6–7. The exceptions to the exclusion of services produced for household consumption are: ‘services produced by employing paid domestic staff’ and ‘the own-account production of housing services by owner-occupiers’. Perhaps because of the controversy surrounding the 1968 SNA revisions, the 1993 and 2008 revisions were not attributed to a specific ‘Expert Group’, but rather to an ‘Inter-Secretariat Working Group on National Accounts’ that ostensibly coordinated the input of a number of international organisations, including the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Statistical Division and regional commissions of the United Nations Secretariat, and the World Bank. Still, the ISWGNA did have ‘senior level representatives’ from each organisation. For the 2008 SNA, these were: Pieter Everaers and Laurs Norlund (Eurostat); Carol S. Carson and Robert Edwards (IMF); Enrico Giovannini (OECD), Willem de Vries and Paul Cheung (United Nations Statistical Division); Shaida Badiee (World Bank), 1. 97. 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