From 1950 to 1970, international development experts experienced a dramatic mood shift. In the early 1950s, optimism reigned. The United States, Japan, and western Europe recovered from the ravages of the Second World War, and experienced high economic growth rates measured in Gross National Product (GNP).Footnote 1 Buoyed by this boom period, specialists in the new field of development economics devised growth theories, which were designed to take lessons from the Western nations’ historical experience, and export them as models for ‘Third World’ countries. They believed that a mixture of expert knowledge, capital, and technology could transform an unequal and tumultuous world of poor decolonizing countries, open to Soviet influence, into a thriving, liberal, and capitalist order.Footnote 2
By 1970, however, the mood had soured. Optimism gave way to frustration, confidence to doubt, certainty to confusion. Despite two decades of rapid GNP growth rates, the wealthy countries no longer seemed to be stellar models for others to follow. Wide-ranging protests over civil rights, women’s rights, the Vietnam War, and environmental degradation gripped countries that had appeared so robust just a few years before. Just as confounding, many ‘Third World’ countries had achieved high GNP growth rates, but also faced high unemployment levels, political repression, and widespread inequality.Footnote 3
How did development economists try to reckon with these unexpected outcomes? Some suggested that the West needed to embrace a New International Economic Order (NIEO), a proposal advanced by dissident economists and ‘Third World’ leaders acting through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to rebalance North–South relations, encourage the cartelization of commodities, and regulate multinational corporations to make the global economy more equitable.Footnote 4 Others argued that radical reorganizations were unnecessary because growth would still smooth out inequality over the long term.Footnote 5
A growing number of experts focused instead on a different aspect of the issue: how countries measured and defined success. During the 1960s and 1970s, economic thinkers such as Dudley Seers, John K. Galbraith, Mahbub ul Haq, Hans Singer, and Morris David Morris came to believe that relying on GNP and pursuing national economic growth had blinded policy-makers to inequality, generated environmental devastation, and exacerbated poverty. In Seers’s words, they criticized the ‘continued addiction to the use of a single aggregative indicator’ as a measure of progress.Footnote 6 To these reformers, questioning the virtues of economic metrics invited greater inquiries about whom development benefited, how it was pursued, what developers could do, and, most of all, what development should do and what it should mean. As part of their critiques, many of these experts, who were largely economists and sociologists, advocated for social indicators to supplement GNP, or even replace it. ‘Social indicators’ was a category that included statistics on income distribution, literacy, and education levels, among many others. A loose, transnational network of heterodox social scientists and civil servants believed that these numbers would help policy-makers to make targeted reforms to reduce inequities of power, opportunity, and wealth within all countries.Footnote 7
This article analyses the rise and evolution of the social indicators movement, making three overlapping arguments. First, the movement derived from criticisms about the unanticipated downsides of rapid economic growth, as measured by GNP and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and yet sought to redress such problems within a technocratic framework.Footnote 8 Interest in social indicators stemmed from a broader discontent with modernity, which pervaded the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s. Although the social indicators movement challenged the economic growth paradigm, it was not radical. It stemmed from a technocratic critique of modernity, which claimed that the root problems of contemporary life could be resolved through the use of socially relevant and more specialized data.
Second, in calling for social knowledge in development policy, reformers evoked an older statistical tradition, when a wide diversity of approaches to measurement and policy-making flourished. In particular, the social indicators movement of the 1960s and 1970s reflected an early twentieth-century research effort to make a quantifiable ‘standard of living’ for workers central to policy-making.Footnote 9 The ‘standard of living’ concept gained transnational support during the 1920s and 1930s, before the widespread use of economic aggregates in national and international policy-making. Over the 1940s and 1950s, GNP narrowed how economists and policy-makers represented living standards. However, the social indicators movement of the 1960s and 1970s revived the standard of living reformers’ emphasis on multi-faceted individual-level analysis, community reform, distributional concerns, and the need for state interventions to reduce poverty. In both of these eras, social scientists and reformers who embraced social indicators saw sub-national measures as the most useful and just way to assess public policy.
Finally, the social indicators movement inspired alternative metrics to supplement GNP in international development institutions, but it had a more limited influence in altering the growth paradigm. Among many new metrics put forward, the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) garnered academic interest and institutional backing in the 1970s. The PQLI marked an important evolution in development thought, operating alongside GNP as a counterpoint and critique that inspired experts to rethink the place of economic growth in policy-making. It also provided a blueprint for alternative development approaches, such as the small-scale development of the Millennium Development Goals, as well as metrics such as the Human Development Index.Footnote 10 Yet advocates for the PQLI and similar metrics sought to revive faith in expert governance and pursue social reform without challenging larger inequalities between countries. By the late 1970s, although social indicators had won widespread support among development experts, many ‘Third World’ governments rejected them, because the statistics did not capture persistent inequalities in the global economy. Moreover, they feared that wealthy countries would use the new metrics to reduce foreign aid commitments for large-scale, industrial development projects. As a result, social indicators made little headway in the countries that reformers sought to help the most.
For the historian, the debates over the meaning and measurement of development during the 1960s and 1970s suggest that the economic growth paradigm has not been as stable or omnipotent as many accounts suggest. Scholars have uncovered how and why the concept of national economic growth became so central to twentieth-century global history. Political theorists and historians have explained the intellectual and political origins of ‘the national economy’ as a policy-making object, and how GNP became the dominant measurement of it.Footnote 11 Related research by historians such as Matthias Schmelzer has shown that economic growth became a powerful policy-making paradigm worldwide, and, in the words of John McNeill, ‘easily the most important idea of the twentieth century’.Footnote 12 Telling the story of GNP has become a particularly popular endeavour. A series of books published during the last decade by scholars and journalists present similar narratives, depicting GNP as a ‘great invention’ that came to ‘rule the world’.Footnote 13 While these recent studies all note contemporary criticisms of GNP, they often overlook the long history of reformers positing alternative ways to measure and value the social world, such as those advocating for social indicators during the 1960s and 1970s, or for standard of living statistics during the early twentieth century. This article thus shifts focus away from the oft-told origins of GNP and the rise of the growth paradigm to the critics, who challenged dominant ways of measuring and assessing development.
By examining the social indicators advocates’ criticisms of economic growth as a policy-making goal, this article builds on recent research exploring the contestation over major concepts in twentieth-century history. As this Journal detailed in its 2011 special issue, for instance, contemporary debates about global inequality stem from a longer history of political, economic, and scientific discourses about the various approaches to development and modernization.Footnote 14 Rob Konkel demonstrated in another recent issue that, within the World Bank, the definition of poverty and the statistics used to quantify it evolved over time as a result of political conflicts within the organization.Footnote 15 Moreover, Morten Jerven exposed the myriad flaws and limitations of postcolonial African statistics that policy-makers and scholars too often uncritically embraced in their assessments of African growth.Footnote 16 In these cases, historians have uncovered the diverse and often conflictual meanings attached to concepts such as development. They have also revealed that even collecting data to assess progress has been rife with political discord and technical challenges.
This article expands on such research by recovering alternative traditions of intellectuals and reformers debating what to measure to define national and international development. After all, the standard of living measures and social indicators were just two of many different sets of numbers that were used to define social goals and political priorities over the last century and a half. Many other reformers – from environmental critics, seeking to price nature, to social psychologists, who sought measures of ‘happiness’ – similarly challenged the intellectual and political hegemony of growth, and proposed new metrics.Footnote 17 Though scarcely studied, these alternatives warrant further attention. Debates among social scientists over how to measure development reflected larger questions about how policy-makers used statistics to narrate stories of national purpose, what leaders prioritized in policy, and how reformers challenged the often-misplaced faith in economic growth as a panacea for political and social ills. The social indicators movement in particular illuminates how historical actors recognized the flaws of technocratic high modernism and the importance of local knowledge, the two pillars of James C. Scott’s study of modern state power, but struggled to reconcile the two in practice through new metrics such as the PQLI.Footnote 18 By investigating how experts pursued social reform through new techniques to measure and assess international development initiatives, this article highlights significant debates over national governance and international power across the twentieth-century world.
From the ‘standard of living’ to ‘economic growth’
Efforts to quantify national economic activity reach back hundreds of years, but they were largely inchoate until the late nineteenth century. Historians often trace attempts to measure national wealth to the 1640s, when the English doctor William Petty counted land in Ireland that the English state could tax. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments tabulated population, trade, industry, and agricultural statistics. By the late nineteenth century, political economists and statisticians in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom were experimenting with rudimentary calculations of the ‘national income’ of their respective states, a term used to describe the annual flow of material goods and capital through a country’s borders.Footnote 19 Governments increasingly relied on priced statistics of productivity and investment to make policies based on the effects that shifts in labour and consumption would have on capital accumulation and market activity.Footnote 20
As economic statistics grew in popularity from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the early twentieth century, reformers began to collect social statistics as a tool to manage and improve life in industrial society. The Industrial Revolution and recurrent boom–bust economic cycles of the mid to late nineteenth century spawned myriad political and social crises in the United States and Europe. Social scientific reformers collected data on the social and economic aspects of everyday life for workers. Among the earliest efforts were those of the French engineer and statistician Frédéric Le Play, who mixed direct participant observation with detailed quantitative studies of family budgets across the whole of Europe in his 1855 monograph, Les ouvriers européens. He saw such social research as a tool to ‘furnish statesmen with a solid basis for resolving social questions’.Footnote 21 In the United States, the incipient labour movement used family budget surveys to illuminate the poor living conditions of industrial workers, and widespread inequality.Footnote 22 Labour leaders backed these efforts as a crucial empirical basis to make distributional claims on behalf of a minimum ‘living’ or ‘fair’ wage.Footnote 23 By the end of the nineteenth century, social reformers quantified many aspects of everyday life, such as unemployment levels, suicides, crime rates, literacy rates, and cost-of-living changes, to track the effects of corporate practice and government policy on workers’ lives.Footnote 24
This desire to measure and define social life found its most ambitious expression in a transatlantic movement to quantify the notion of a ‘standard of living’ for the ‘average’ worker. The notion that experts could divine a widely comparable set of living standards emerged as the United States and European countries grappled with the disruptive and transformational effects of rapid industrialization, migration, and mass consumption. Yet there was little consensus on a definition for a standard of living. Victoria de Grazia notes that Americans held a much more consumerist definition of the standard of living than their European counterparts, who stressed the hard-to-define qualities of a good life over counting prices of consumer goods and purchasing behaviour.Footnote 25
Nevertheless, American and European social scientists linked the phrase with a set of numbers that policy-makers could employ to compare classes of workers within a country, or across borders. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) carried out studies of workers’ standard of living in most European countries, the United States, Japan, China, India, and much of South America from the late 1920s to 1939.Footnote 26 The desire to measure workers’ daily lives placed ‘notions of the standard of living at almost the center of current economic thinking’ in the 1920s, according to the American economist Leo Wolman.Footnote 27 This research epitomized the social reformist impulse behind statistically informed policy-making.
To render social data comparable across different contexts, the ILO and the League of Nations sought to standardize how to define and collect standard of living statistics. In the early 1920s, for instance, the ILO paired with the Ford Motor Company in a project that exposed many difficulties in comparing wellbeing between labourers in Detroit and European cities, prompting questions over whether Henry Ford’s workers should be held up as a standard for labourers everywhere.Footnote 28 In the 1930s, the League of Nations expanded on this research, culminating in the League’s Sub-Committee on Standard of Living of 1938, under the direction of the Australian diplomat Frank MacDougall and the British economist Noel Hall.Footnote 29
The League’s efforts, as with the collection of social statistics in general, reflected a deep faith that such information could redress class conflict, poverty, and social strife through empirically based social policies. According to Hall, in a world where leaders had become so preoccupied with ‘internal stability’ amid the global depression and the rising influence of fascism and communism, the capitalist world needed better social information to improve overall welfare.Footnote 30 The ILO director, Albert Thomas, claimed that standard of living statistics ‘held the key to employment and international peace’, by allowing heads of states to direct their energy and finances to redressing the conditions of the neediest groups, more evenly distributing wealth, and strengthening the very nature of liberal capitalism in a world of threatening alternatives.Footnote 31 In this line of thinking, the construction of comparable statistics for different social groups and occupations served not only business interests and academic research but also government policy-makers.
Colonial powers similarly imbued such statistics with great significance, as officials sought data to measure the standard of living in their imperial holdings. In the Dutch East Indies, researchers collected a wide range of statistics, from public health spending, to housing construction, to drug use, in order to compare the gap between colonial Dutch and native peoples’ living standards.Footnote 32 In colonial Africa, British authorities recognized that low indigenous living standards, based on a range of colonial surveys and statistical missions from the 1930s to gather information on how subject populations lived, threatened the future legitimacy of colonialism itself. When African workers engaged in a series of strikes during the early years of the Second World War, colonial experts searched for ways to improve workers’ standard of living, to ensure that colonial policy would ‘appear’ progressive but still avoid precipitating self-government. All the while, the outpouring of social data reinforced to Africans the vast gulf between their status and material circumstances, and those of the ruling class.Footnote 33
Amid this transnational interest in calculating standards of living, economists also made a series of innovations to depict a more abstract entity: ‘the national economy’. Statistical advances by the US economist Simon Kuznets and the British economist Colin Clark led to income estimates for their respective countries, which policy-makers used to manage the Great Depression by viewing a national economy as a whole. During the Second World War, aggregate economic metrics became critical to managing domestic economies for wartime mobilization. By the war’s end, economists and policy-makers relied on a new statistic, GNP, which aggregated a country’s total annual production of all goods and services. GNP offered policy-makers a way to calculate how much a government could spend, and how much it could increase taxes, to achieve its military procurement goals, as well as a clear way to present that information to the public. In the post-war years, such aggregate economic statistics became central to national governance.Footnote 34
Standard of living statistics and GNP held promise for policy-makers because they made aspects of the social world legible in concise numerical terms. But the two types of numbers implied different policy priorities and choices for national leaders. Whereas standard of living statistics provided individualized details about how workers lived, national income accounting offered a snapshot of the economy as an integrated whole. Standard of living advocates emphasized distribution through targeted social interventions, to improve the material wellbeing of disempowered social groups. In contrast, GNP directed attention to the entire economy, so policy-makers sought to make that abstraction grow or shrink, under the belief that doing so would necessarily benefit all. Standard of living statistics were sub-national, whereas GNP was delimited by the nation-state. As GNP became increasingly popular in policy circles and popular discourses, it did not replace standard of living concepts altogether. But it enabled greater focus on ‘the national economy’ as a more generalized policy-making object.
By the end of the 1930s, policy-makers linked standard of living research and national income statistics by suggesting that GNP growth would raise standards of living, through an autogenic trickle-down process. The League of Nations’ work on standards of living revealed as much. Noel Hall’s 1938 report on the work of the League’s Sub-Committee on Standard of Living argued that the main emphasis for governments worldwide ‘should be focussed upon a single objective, the raising of the several national standards of living’. Hall stressed the improvement of workers’ consumption habits through a ‘redistribution of productive resources’, but also the need for ‘well-designed policies to stimulate production, particularly if they are international in character’.Footnote 35
In 1945, the League of Nations’ final report on economic matters placed even greater emphasis on aggregate production. Countries rich and poor needed to substitute ‘positive for negative aims – not the relief of unemployment when it develops, but the attainment of high and stable levels of output and employment in keeping with the capacity of industry and agriculture; not the protection of particular interests against foreign competition, but the encouragement of general expansion’. The report noted that ‘policy must be concerned not only with the size of the national income, but also with its distribution’, though the focus aimed squarely at ‘expansion’ of national income to achieve it.Footnote 36
Similar thinking appeared in colonial policy too. Frederick Cooper shows that British colonial officials often proclaimed that increasing the ‘productive capacity’ of the colonies would serve to raise standards of living for Africans in a trickle-down process, using the promise of future gains from increased production to tamp down distributional demands, without introducing redistributive policies or disrupting wartime output.Footnote 37 The assistant under-secretary of state for the Colonial Office Gerard Clauson made this point clear in a 1942 paper. To ‘raise the general standard of living’ in the colonies, the UK needed to ‘increase the aggregate consumption of mankind’. Since the ‘aggregate consumption of mankind is roughly but not exactly equal to the aggregate output’, he argued that increasing production should be the policy priority.Footnote 38 Discussions of standard of living statistics, so rich during the 1920s and 1930s, narrowed, as economists increasingly argued for growing aggregate income as the best way to lift standards of living. By this time, many economists had adopted GNP per capita as a shorthand for measuring the standard of living.Footnote 39
The widespread use of GNP made possible the concept of national economic growth. The growth concept gained cultural power and political significance because it allowed policy-makers to redress both high poverty and distributional conflicts through a superficially neutral language of technocratic consensus.Footnote 40 Growth became a powerful mantra in the post-war United States, western Europe, and Japan.Footnote 41 The Cold War further reinforced and amplified the centrality of economic growth for nation-states everywhere. Policy-makers in the United States and Europe expanded earlier efforts to ‘develop’ Latin America, Asia, Africa, and southern Europe, through foreign aid designed to spark growth. They carefully measured and tracked changes with new national income and product statistics, in the hope of winning hearts and minds.Footnote 42 The Soviet Union also promised material transformation through rapid growth, which was measured as Net Material Product, the socialist version of GNP. Planned industrialization represented an alternative path to modernity, which promised widespread prosperity without the imperial legacy of the United States and Europe. After Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders ramped up their foreign aid commitments to help communist methods of growth compete with capitalist ones.Footnote 43 The Cold War was a geopolitical conflict, but it was also a competition over which ideological system could generate growth across the world.
In the era of decolonization, nationalist leaders also spoke the language of growth, and adopted GNP as the measure of success. In India, Prasanta Mahalanobis, an eminent statistician and the head of the country’s powerful planning commission, adopted GNP as the metric for his five-year plans. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first post-independence prime minister, embraced GNP growth as the ‘means to build a modern nation’.Footnote 44 In Kenya, Tom Mboya, the country’s minister of justice and a leading figure in its development efforts, argued that the first objective of Kenya’s planning was to ‘attain higher growth rates of our national income and, therefore, achieve higher living standards for all people’.Footnote 45 In postcolonial Sudan, ‘the rate of economic growth became the measure of a successful government’.Footnote 46
Low or insufficient growth could imperil those whose legitimacy rested on major economic transformation. In Indonesia, Sukarno’s revolutionary postcolonial government struggled with this problem, and ultimately lost power, as the country experienced high inflation and low production by the mid 1960s. Subsequently, General Suharto staked his New Order regime’s legitimacy on its capacity to improve the situation through a ‘commitment to modernization and the promise of stability and rapid economic growth’.Footnote 47 Achieving high economic growth rates was a powerful ‘act of sovereignty’ that promised material transformations to redress past exploitation and shaped the economic imaginaries of many revolutionary nationalist and postcolonial leaders.Footnote 48
To engineer high growth, in the 1950s and 1960s policy-makers turned to economists. Scholars such as Walt Rostow applied their growth theories to the foreign aid policies of the United States.Footnote 49 Others advised new national governments directly, such as Arthur Lewis’s work for Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana.Footnote 50 Hans Singer recalled that GNP ‘enabled economists to transfer familiar concepts and familiar modes of thinking to the relatively new but rapidly emerging problems of the Third World’, assuming that a ‘trickle-down’ effect would reach everyone.Footnote 51 By 1960, GNP growth had become ‘the premier goal of social policy throughout the world’.Footnote 52 In this context, economists garnered legitimacy and authority as the key experts to analyse, model, and replicate national economic growth globally.
Critiques of GNP growth and the rise of social indicators
Although economic growth had become a central policy goal across the world by the late 1950s, critics of economic growth and the reliance on aggregate economic metrics increasingly voiced their concerns. Popular intellectuals and writers, such as John Kenneth Galbraith, David Reisman, and Vance Packard, lamented the social downsides of rapid growth, including rampant consumerism, increasing waste, and social alienation.Footnote 53 The Marxist economist Paul Baran criticized the United States for undermining or overthrowing governments that adopted nationalistic approaches to growth, and thus narrowed economic possibilities for the ‘Third World’.Footnote 54 Scholars such as Ezra Mishan and Kenneth Boulding identified the myriad ‘costs of economic growth’, which ranged from traffic congestion, to toxic pollution, to spiritual despair, and they pondered growth’s limits.Footnote 55 Colin Clark and Simon Kuznets, two key progenitors of GNP and national income accounting, both came to lament the narrow focus on economic growth over social wellbeing.Footnote 56 By the mid 1960s, environmentalists in the United States and western Europe were forcefully critiquing rapid growth as the cause of ecological catastrophes, and instead sought to pursue a high ‘quality of life’, in what became one of the most prominent attacks on the growth paradigm.Footnote 57 Such criticisms resonated with a growing disillusionment with modernity defined by technocracy and industrialization, as expressed by scholars such as Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse.Footnote 58 Just as economic growth emerged as a powerful concept for policy-makers seeking to resolve old distributional conflicts, for its critics the pursuit of growth stood in as a catch-all for the ills of modern societies and the misguided values of their elites.
As such criticisms of growth in wealthy countries intensified in the 1960s, international development experts questioned the preoccupation with GNP growth in ‘Third World’ countries, too. Foremost among these were Dudley Seers and Hans Singer. Seers had studied economics at the University of Cambridge, and he worked in various UN organizations and UK government agencies during the 1940s and 1950s. By the late 1960s, he shared many of the emerging critiques of economic growth that were current in wealthy countries. He also pondered the validity of economic growth in international development policies, and the suitability of GNP for the ‘Third World’.Footnote 59 Seers argued that focusing on GNP growth led to centralized and excessive planning, so much so that ‘typical fast growth policies seem both to require and to induce oppression’.Footnote 60 High growth rates concealed persistent poverty, which led to pervasive physiological ills (such as protein deficiencies in children) and vast social problems (such as limited access to education). ‘The noses of the social scientist and the statistician should be rubbed into such social realities during the decades that lie ahead’, Seers claimed in 1969.Footnote 61
Hans Singer agreed. He too had studied at Cambridge, as one of John Maynard Keynes’s first PhD students, and he later worked for the UN, where he produced a series of influential articles on growth, employment, and trade theory.Footnote 62 By the early 1960s, Singer came to echo Seers’s criticisms, and he called for non-economic knowledge to help development experts refocus their attention on social issues. He argued that, in the mid 1960s, ‘The development economist, as he began to turn away from his textbooks and learned about underdeveloped countries, was driven back towards the earlier position, viz., that those queer fish and lesser breeds – sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc. – had after all a lot to contribute to the problems of economic development.’Footnote 63 Seers and Singer were economists who had once embraced the growth paradigm, but who turned against it to promote development approaches that directly targeted poverty and inequality.
Criticisms of growth and GNP also resonated among international development experts, because of changes in foreign aid policies and international politics. Upon taking office in 1969, the US President Richard Nixon redirected foreign aid away from large-scale government-led projects towards promoting flows of private investment, to cut costs for the United States, and to curtail Cold War tensions. With the Soviet leadership open to pursuing détente with the United States, the strategic competition between the superpowers waned.Footnote 64 In addition, by the late 1960s there were hundreds of thousands of development practitioners who had travelled across the world, and who had experienced fraught development efforts at first hand. They saw how development projects upset local ecologies and social stability, how donor interests superseded those of recipients, and how synoptic national plans failed to achieve their goals.Footnote 65
New data presented a confounding relationship between growth and poverty. According to the Pearson report, the result of a World Bank initiative to assess the state of international development, the ‘Third World’ had averaged a 4.8% annual GNP growth rate from 1950 to 1967, exceeding the 4.3% rate for the ‘First World’.Footnote 66 Yet subsequent analysis revealed that, despite high growth rates, ‘Third World’ countries also faced high unemployment, political repression, environmental degradation, and social inequality.Footnote 67 For all these reasons, it became politically viable for leaders and policy-makers to rethink their commitment to pursuing economic growth in the ‘Third World’.
In this environment, experts challenged the prevailing development approaches around the world. Scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America made a series of important critiques. By the late 1960s UNCTAD and the Economic Commission for Latin America had nurtured research into critical approaches, such as dependency theory, which analysed persistent divergence between wealthy and poor countries.Footnote 68
Inequality within countries became another important point of contention. The Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, for instance, wondered whether national economic growth should remain a top developmental priority, given that it had led to vast domestic income inequality and ‘failed to translate into improvements in the lives of Pakistan’s masses’.Footnote 69 During a powerful speech in Karachi on 24 April 1968, Haq decried the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the country’s twenty-two richest families, and ‘tried to focus national attention on justice in the distribution of wealth in the midst of celebration over a rapid rate of growth’.Footnote 70 In addition, feminist economists exposed the absence of unwaged women’s work from national accounting systems, and emphasized the often-overlooked role of women in development theory and practice.Footnote 71
In this context, major development institutions began to embrace reform. The World Bank shifted its lending policy away from large-scale national plans towards more rural and small-scale projects.Footnote 72 In the United States, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations created the Overseas Development Council (ODC) to respond to the many criticisms of US foreign aid efforts. James P. Grant, the ODC’s founding president, used the organization to highlight the problems of mainstream growth-oriented development. He put the matter bluntly in a 1973 article for the popular Foreign Policy magazine: ‘the unparalleled economic growth rates achieved by most developed countries during the 1960’s had little or no effect on most of the world’s people, who continue to live in desperate poverty’.Footnote 73 Development economists’ optimism about the possibilities of rapid growth in the 1950s had faded by the late 1960s.
Many experts began to reformulate the purpose of international development away from national economic growth towards redistribution, employment, and direct poverty reduction. Dudley Seers and Hans Singer took leading roles in this effort, through their leadership of the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, where they oversaw dozens of reports and conferences about new development approaches. Singer also worked part-time with the ILO, for whom he embarked on a 1971 mission to Kenya to study the country’s chronic unemployment problems.Footnote 74 The mission’s report on Kenya touted a new paradigm for development, dubbed ‘redistribution with growth’.Footnote 75 Kenya’s minister of finance and planning, Mwai Kibaki, explained that
in Kenya, there have been assumptions in our planning process to the effect that if we planned for economic growth, very rapid economic growth, then employment would be generated as part and parcel of it … [W]hat is now proposed is that it is not enough to plan for growth in national income, it is not enough to plan for growth in production. One has to regard employment as being one of the central objectives.
By emphasizing employment, governments would begin to think more about the distribution of wealth within a society, not just aggregate income. Kibaki claimed that this focus on redistribution was a ‘welcome social objective’.Footnote 76
Similarly, other reformers homed in on the root elements of poverty, or what experts at the time called ‘basic human needs’. Advocates for this approach, such as Mahbub ul Haq and the British economist and co-founder of the IDS, Paul Streeten, argued that development policies needed to satisfy basic needs, such as adequate shelter and good health care. They should seek to eradicate poverty through targeted, localized projects, rather than through the major nationally oriented interventions geared at generating growth.Footnote 77
These new goals for development not only challenged and revised the growth paradigm, but also required new metrics. During the 1960s and 1970s, growth critics rallied around a burgeoning movement for social indicators to supplant the widespread reliance on economic aggregates and to help guide policy-makers towards the new objectives for development policy. In 1964, a grant from the Dutch government funded the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) to study ‘social factors’ in economic growth.Footnote 78 In 1966, the American sociologist Raymond Bauer, in an influential study on the domestic social impact of the space race and the militarization of the Cold War, called for social indicators to supplement economic ones.Footnote 79 The following year, the US Senator Walter Mondale sponsored a bill to adopt national social indicators alongside economic ones and to create a ‘Council of Social Advisers’ to provide advice similar to the Council of Economic Advisers in the United States, amid urban rioting and growing student protest.Footnote 80 In 1970, the UN Statistical Commission noted that ‘national statistical offices are under great pressure to develop social statistics which relate directly and immediately to social concerns of the general public and political authorities’, and sought to increase the collection and promote further standardization of social data.Footnote 81 Even statisticians from some growth-oriented governments in the Global South desired social statistics. Writing in 1975, a member of India’s Planning Commission noted the ‘much greater degree of awareness about problems connected with inequality in income or in the distribution of public expenditure’ in the ‘Third World’ and endorsed the creation of a system of social and demographic indicators.Footnote 82
For the many experts who had grown wary of the growth paradigm, social indicators offered a better way to measure developmental change, and thus tell its story. The development economists Paul Streeten and Norman Hicks celebrated social indicators because they reflected concerns ‘with ends as well as means, or at least with intermediate ends nearer to the ultimate end of a full and healthy life’, and because such numbers were ‘capable of catching something of the human, social, and cultural costs of opulence … as well as poverty’.Footnote 83 Social indicators would help policy-makers identify social priorities and make targeted policy interventions to improve their population’s wellbeing, just as experts in the League of Nations and the ILO had hoped for standard of living statistics.
The similarities between the revived focus on distribution and basic needs and the earlier work on standards of living were not lost on contemporary observers. The American researchers Robert Parke and David Seidman wrote in 1978 that the ‘concerns of the social indicators movement’ were ‘not new’ and reflected the social research initiatives of the early twentieth century.Footnote 84 In a 1981 article, the development economist Douglas Rimmer compared standard of living research conducted by the League of Nations and the ILO during the 1920s and 1930s with the concern with social wellbeing during the 1970s. The turn towards basic human needs and the search for indicators ‘instead of the abstract monetary aggregates’ such as GNP amounted to a ‘counterrevolution’ in development policy. Reformers in the 1970s, he claimed, wanted to challenge ‘the sovereignty of economic growth in the thinking of development economists’ and to revive the focus on ‘minimal living standards’ as in the earlier era. For Rimmer, an ardent critic of redistributive policies, the new approaches portended the ‘collectivization of economic life’, and thus warranted scepticism.Footnote 85 In his view, the connections between standard of living measures, social indicators, and basic needs thinking were all too clear.
The PQLI and the limits of social indicators
Unlike the standard of living researchers, many advocates of social indicators sought to create a single aggregate index of social wellbeing, to aid policy-makers accustomed to relying on the simple single figure of GNP. For instance, UNRISD revived the earlier League of Nations studies on living standards, and published new indicators for ‘levels of living’ (1966), a series of metrics for studying and comparing ‘welfare’ in 1970, and a ‘General Index’ that linked different social indicators into a single number.Footnote 86 The Russell Sage Foundation, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development embarked on similar quests to help simplify the growing range of social statistics into a single figure.Footnote 87
Of all these efforts, one of the most successful in terms of expert interest and financial support came from the ODC. In 1977, the organization tasked Morris David Morris, an economist from the University of Washington with a background in sociology, to construct a social index. Morris responded with the PQLI. The PQLI emerged from the growing emphasis on basic human needs and reducing inequality in international development policy. ‘To the extent that development planners within poor countries and aid dispensers in donor countries now focus more directly on projects that emphasize distribution of benefits,’ Morris wrote, ‘they need not only new planning strategies but also additional measurement systems.’Footnote 88 He designed the PQLI to fill that void. While carrying out his initial work on the index, Morris won support from the US Agency for International Development (AID). In the mid 1970s, AID had shifted its funding to include more ‘basic human needs’ projects, but the organization lacked an effective metric to measure their efforts.Footnote 89 The PQLI fitted well with the mandate. AID gave a grant to Morris, which helped him complete his research and publish the first version of the new index in 1979.
The PQLI rested on a very simple set of numbers. The index was based on infant mortality, life expectancy at age one, and literacy rates. Morris transformed each indicator into an index by comparing the level of the indicator to a fixed range of possible levels, and then taking the average of the three components. He intended the PQLI to serve national governments for making comparisons, but also for sub-national analysis of regional and local results according to gender or income levels. He viewed it as ‘a practical measure of social distribution that will avoid the limitations of the GNP, that will minimize cultural and developmental ethnocentricity, and that will be internationally comparable’.Footnote 90 As with GNP, Morris sought clarity, simplicity, and comparability. In contrast to other economic aggregates, he hoped that the PQLI would give more insight into the social health and wellbeing of a country’s population.
Morris’s index received institutional and professional acclaim from around the world, especially among international development specialists, who saw it as particularly valuable for ‘Third World’ countries. James Grant of the ODC hailed the PQLI because it depicted ‘a stereoscopic view – a way of looking behind the façade of the GNP numbers’.Footnote 91 Dudley Seers eagerly anticipated the PQLI’s arrival, as did many more development experts who saw it as ‘vastly more illuminating in some respects than GNP’.Footnote 92 Douglas Rimmer also celebrated Morris’s work, because it ‘brought out with clarity and force the merits of a simple, demographically based index as a measurement of poverty and material progress alternative to dubious aggregations of economic output’.Footnote 93 The PQLI showed that a few countries with high growth rates, such as Brazil, appeared far less impressive than their GNP would suggest. A few small countries, notably Sri Lanka, with a history of investing in basic needs, scored far better than growth marvels such as Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, or India. The data on Sri Lanka, according to one observer, told ‘a success story, in terms of human welfare, more truly remarkable than the more widely publicized stories of countries which are far wealthier in terms of per capita GNP’.Footnote 94 According to the Indian journalist M. V. Kamath, the PQLI provided ‘a fascinating and largely accurate picture of nations as they are, not what their GNP alone would make us believe’.Footnote 95 In the tradition of early standard of living indicators, it gave analysts confidence that they could measure and thus improve material wellbeing of different social groups in a country.
The PQLI was also similar to the standard of living statistics in the way that it pointed to ‘quality of life’ as the new ultimate purpose for development in place of growth. The phrase ‘quality of life’ was an umbrella term to redirect policy attention away from narrow economic goals towards how a population lived.Footnote 96 Morris used the phrase to indicate only physical wellbeing – defined as living a long life with the ability to read – and stressed that his measure did not promise to reveal anything about subjective wellbeing or life ‘satisfaction’. The PQLI was designed with a very specific purpose: ‘to help focus the search for strategies that might yield quicker improvements in the condition of the very poorest that can be expected if we wait for benefits to flow “naturally” from increases in national income’.Footnote 97
After Morris published his initial methods and findings, he hoped to persuade governments to use the new index. Shortly after his initial research was complete, AID sent him to India to explore options for making the PQLI central to Indian development plans. His visit came at a propitious moment. In the years after independence, postcolonial countries had often relied on colonial-era statistical offices and technical assistance from the wealthy countries to build up their statistical capabilities. By the 1960s, India had crafted an extensive statistical service, which featured a formal national Department of Statistics for national income data collection and calculations, as well as the National Sample Survey to gather information on the country’s socioeconomic circumstances.Footnote 98 Over the 1970s, Indian economists debated how to use this data to measure poverty. Poverty persisted following the country’s first four Five Year Plans, leaving nearly 200 million people in a precarious condition. India was the first country in the ‘developing’ world to make use of statistical ‘poverty line’ measurements. But economists such as Pranab Bardhan and Amartya Sen questioned existing metrics and sought alternative ways of identifying persistent poverty, thereby helping policy-makers to craft new policies to target it. ‘The Indian poor may not be accustomed to receiving much help’, Sen wrote in 1974, ‘but he is beginning to get used to being counted.’Footnote 99 All the new data and metrics garnered the interest of intellectuals, but to little overall effect.
In India, Morris and his wife, the economist Michelle McAlpin, travelled around the country for two weeks to meet with statisticians, collect data, and visit various government agencies. The trip resulted in a book that offered national and state-level PQLI metrics for both men and women throughout the country and compared India’s results against those of other countries. The PQLI varied considerably from state to state, with communist Kerala high at the top. Because India as a whole ranked quite low, Morris and McAlpin hoped that the data would provide valuable information for a policy revolution. They aspired to create useful data for targeted, state-level policies designed to raise the PQLI. In particular, they sought to alert policy-makers about the need for policies to improve ‘the status of women’.Footnote 100
In the end, however, the PQLI did not become an important tool in Indian politics. The absence of data for the index’s key indicators was one problem. India lacked reliable statistical information for its many states, and Morris had to use some guesswork to reach his initial index for the country. He admitted as such, acknowledging that his initial data was ‘not good’.Footnote 101 Scholarly reviewers in India of Morris’s work lamented how troublesome this was. One reviewer suggested that it would be ‘prohibitively expensive’ for the Indian national government to set up a statistical apparatus to collect the necessary information. And, as it stood, to make policy on ‘such poor data’ would be ‘disastrous’.Footnote 102 Replicating Morris’s initial findings proved difficult, too. Indian economists argued over his weighting system and scaling methods for the three components of the index, which reflected the challenges inherent in determining the relative value of the various parts in an index number. By the mid 1980s, multiple efforts to experiment with alternative starting points and scaling choices were leading to considerably different results than those that Morris had presented just a half-decade earlier.Footnote 103
The PQLI’s challenges went beyond data availability. Critics argued that its components did not suffice as ‘satisfactory measures of human welfare’.Footnote 104 It reflected just one small piece of the many criticisms about what GNP excluded. For instance, one Indian observer lamented that the PQLI could not measure other important aspects of life that were also neglected by GNP, such as ‘justice, political freedom or a sense of participation’ in politics.Footnote 105 While Morris never designed the index to do so, the social indicators movement had been predicated on redirecting policy-makers’ focus to ‘subjective’ aspects of life beyond economic notions of value. While life expectancy and literacy were non-economic variables, they could not, as many reformers hoped, reveal anything about life satisfaction or overall welfare.Footnote 106 Moreover, it was unclear how the publication of PQLI data connected to larger policy changes. ‘A successful policy’, Morris and McAlpin concluded, ‘requires a high degree of popular participation and self-administration.’ However, in a country as administratively complex as India, this was no easy task. It was not evident how their new statistical techniques would alone engender greater participation.Footnote 107 The fate of the PQLI in India played out in debates in economic journals, but not on government balance sheets.
Morris’s struggles with the PQLI in India spoke to broader concerns about social indicators. Were they, and indexes such as the PQLI, meant to replace growth and GNP? Or were they simply to help policy-makers ensure that the fruits of growth were widely shared? How one answered those questions suggested the priority of distributive or basic needs concerns, compared to larger national economic production. Morris himself described the PQLI in contradictory ways. In some instances, He referred to the index as a ‘practical measure of social distribution that will avoid the limitations of the GNP’.Footnote 108 Yet he also often spoke of it as a tool to expose previously hidden or underappreciated ‘factors’ in spurring conventionally understood economic growth. For all the rhetoric of the PQLI as an alternative to GNP, its advocates often described it in terms of growth. Morris suggested as much. In India, he claimed, a ‘proper emphasis on raising the PQLI’ was ‘likely to make possible a higher rate of growth’. While also hoping that it would ‘ease the tensions that such growth must necessarily generate’, he framed PQLI in terms of growth just the same. Subsequent observers would reiterate such criticisms, especially noting that the PQLI had little to say about distributional questions.Footnote 109
The PQLI faced an even larger challenge, in that many leaders in ‘developing’ countries viewed it with suspicion, along with the basic human needs approach to development. The Malawian scholar Thandika Mkandawire noted that, for many African leaders, moving away from growth-oriented strategies generated scepticism ‘founded not only on the dismal performance by the advanced countries as supporters of the poor but also on the justifiable fear that the sudden interest of the rich countries in “poverty” was a ploy, a means of diverting attention from the real issues, namely the need for the restructuring of the world economic order’ through the NIEO. The latter consisted of a radical set of proposals to reform international economic relations, to spur growth in the Global South, and to provide a material basis to generate international political equality.Footnote 110 The Indian economist Ajit Singh claimed that ‘Third World’ leaders feared that metrics such as the PQLI and the basic human needs approach would ‘discourage industrial development’, and would place too much emphasis on rural and informal employment strategies.Footnote 111 In general, many experts and leaders from the Global South worried that a shift in donor countries’ financing towards smaller-scale interventions for social objectives would enable them to shirk greater responsibilities to promote larger-scale development, and would thus perpetuate structural inequality between countries.Footnote 112
In the face of such critiques, those promoting social indicators had to confront the limited utility of their metrics. Advocates for social indicators from the West often explained such responses as part of a larger struggle between reform-minded experts and obdurate ‘Third World’ leaders. The US AID administrator and PQLI supporter John Gilligan argued, ‘When you talk of improving the economic conditions of the neglected in any society you are challenging head-on the existence of the political and economic elite.’Footnote 113 Yet, for many in the ‘Third World’, social indicators seemed to be less a welcome reform and more a tool for the United States and the World Bank to thwart the radical and globally redistributive claims of ‘Third World’ activism. Without a compelling critique of historical inequalities of power between countries, social indicators advocates found diminishing enthusiasm for their product among those whom they hoped to help the most.
Although the PQLI rarely entered into formal national accounts, it inspired many wide-ranging and more enduring reform efforts. In the late 1980s, Mahbub ul Haq seized on the extensive research into social indicators to create a new development metric, the Human Development Index (HDI). Released in 1990, the HDI measured life expectancy, literacy rates, education levels, and ‘income standard of living’, which was defined by GDP per capita at purchasing power parity.Footnote 114
Criticisms of economic growth persisted, too. Social indicators advocates, who sought development approaches that put greater emphasis on individual wellbeing, equality, and opportunity, adumbrated the rise in the 1980s and 1990s of a movement for ‘human development’, which sought to enhance ‘human capabilities’ rather than to give priority to national economic growth.Footnote 115 These subsequent reform efforts bore many of the same intellectual hallmarks as the social indicators movement and standard of living research. They reflected a faith that sub-national, localized data on people’s consumption habits, inequalities, and social worlds offered more valuable insights to policy-makers than national economic aggregates.
While social critiques of growth continued to attract strong interest from scholars and reformers in international organizations, the context that had given rise to the social indicators movement faded, as faith in economic growth revived in the 1980s and 1990s. The international politics of measurement emerged when many experts came to accept a world in which there seemed legitimate, visible reasons to reject the pursuit of growth.Footnote 116 Whereas notions of limits and downsides to growth suffused popular culture, political discourse, and international development policy during the 1970s, just a few years later they dissipated. In the 1980s a new ‘antistatist growthmanship’ swept through the capitalist world, buoyed by lower oil prices and the declining fortunes of communist countries.Footnote 117 Once again leaders hailed the virtues of expanding GNP, as new ‘trickle-down’ evangelists claimed ‘not state-sponsored redistribution but the unhampered workings of growing markets would benefit even the most disadvantaged’. Thus reconfigured, the revitalized growth paradigm allowed policy-makers to avoid the interventions implied by social indicators advocates, and instead point to growing aggregate prosperity as progress.Footnote 118 While the interest of scholars and activists in social indicators and new metrics such as the HDI persisted, it coexisted with a more powerful faith in market-oriented GNP growth.
Conclusion
The debates over the PQLI and social indicators in the 1970s reflected the longer history of debates over how best to measure society. Economic growth, expressed as changes in GNP, redefined the purpose of national governance in the twentieth century, but there were many other statistics and governing strategies that challenged the growth paradigm. From early family budget studies during Western industrialization, to the standard of living statistics in the early twentieth century, to the rise of growth as a policy-making object, to the social indicators reformers of the 1960s and 1970s, the last century and a half has been rife with debates over what the purpose of national governance should be, how government policy should be measured and assessed, and which numbers best capture what societies value. Those interested in standard of living statistics sought comparisons between classes of workers, to allow policy-makers to promote a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunity among different social groups. Although the rise of the growth paradigm obscured this tradition, the social indicators movement revived it. Advocates for social indicators questioned both the means and the ends of growth, seeking to focus on more sub-national and targeted subjects, such as individual and group inequalities, much like standard of living researchers had done. Because metrics such as the PQLI never replaced, or even complemented, GNP in most countries’ accounting sheets, it is easy to dismiss the social indicators movement as a failure. But to do so would miss the richness, depth, and breadth of the debates over the meaning of development and progress across the twentieth-century world.
The debates about how best to quantify social and economic life also reflected long-standing questions of power. As Morris David Morris and many other reformers learned, meaningful development required more than just better numbers. It needed a new politics to create new policies. Yet such political change was hard to nurture. Advocates for social indicators during the 1960s and 1970s too often imparted great power to their numbers alone to build more just and equal societies. Growth theorists and social indicators activists have both downplayed to different degrees the importance of politics, defined as extended engagement with the forces and institutions that generated inequality (both between and within countries) and environmental degradation. The history of standard of living research and the social indicators movement attests to the strength of technocratic governance, both as a source for constructing measures and policies to challenge the growth paradigm, and as a constraint on imagining alternatives to it.
Stephen Macekura is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Indiana University. His next book, Mis-measuring the development century, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
