Averages, indexes and national income: accounting for progress in colonial Australia

Ben Huf

doi:10.1080/21552851.2019.1670220

Abstract

ABSTRACTEconomic statistics are now such an ingrained feature of everyday political discourse that they have recently become ripe as topics of historical scrutiny. This study contributes to this scholarship by shifting attention from what has been a largely American-Anglo discussion to the innovations of prominent Australian statists in the colonial and early Federation periods. In contrast to recent approaches that have treated economic statistics as emerging during the twentieth century as a discrete body of knowledge distinct from nineteenth-century ‘moral statistics’, this history is approached as an exercise in ‘accounting in history’. It highlights both patterns and discontinuities in governmental deliberations that facilitated statistical innovation, historicising and complicating the relationship between economics and statistics as domains of knowledge. By drawing attention to the tensions and overlaps of successive intellectual projects engaged by Australian government statisticians – described here in terms of transparency and control; the average man and colonial progress; the breadwinner and national wealth; the human unit and the social organism; and the consumer and ‘the economy’ – it develops new perspectives on why calculations of economic averages, indexes and national income emerged as devices of government. As major producers and consumers of contemporary economic statistics, such perspectives might provide fresh epistemological and interdisciplinary grounding for business and management scholars.

Highlights

Economic indicators and macroeconomic statistics are today such familiar features of everyday government and expert discourse that they seemingly describe the natural furniture of the world
We have come to learn that the explosion in economic statistics collated and published by national governments was more than a byproduct of the ‘Keynesian revolution’, but reflected its own distinctive revolution in economic knowledge that emerged parallel to macroeconomic theory and econometrics in the late-nineteenth century, transforming the objects and aims of twentieth-century government (Tooze 2001)
Five successive projects are examined over the course of this period: the use of numbers by early imperial officials to illustrate government ‘transparency’ that empowered subjects even as counting populations was developed as a means for social ‘control’; Archer and Hayter’s attempts to account for an Australian ‘average man’ in terms of a more generalised ‘colonial progress’; Coghlan’s constructions of the male ‘breadwinner’ whose indexed wages and purchasing power was determined by the distribution of ‘national wealth’; Knibbs’ calculations of an individualised ‘human unit’ who evolved as part of the national, imperial and global ‘social organism’; and, lastly, twentieth-century economists’ rationalised ‘consumer’ occupying ‘the economy’, in which private purchasing power was regulated in maximise national aggregates

Summary

Introduction

Economic indicators and macroeconomic statistics are today such familiar features of everyday government and expert discourse that they seemingly describe the natural furniture of the world. Five successive projects are examined over the course of this period: the use of numbers by early imperial officials to illustrate government ‘transparency’ that empowered subjects even as counting populations was developed as a means for social ‘control’; Archer and Hayter’s attempts to account for an Australian ‘average man’ in terms of a more generalised ‘colonial progress’; Coghlan’s constructions of the male ‘breadwinner’ whose indexed wages and purchasing power was determined by the distribution of ‘national wealth’; Knibbs’ calculations of an individualised ‘human unit’ who evolved as part of the national, imperial and global ‘social organism’; and, lastly, twentieth-century economists’ rationalised ‘consumer’ occupying ‘the economy’, in which private purchasing power was regulated in maximise national aggregates In tracing these successive projects, I argue that there is no simple genealogy between these statistical outlooks. One might sense a reproduction of the same tensions between the human unit and the ‘social organism’, the ‘breadwinner’ and ‘national wealth’, or between the ‘average man’ and ‘colonial progress’, each of which were a function of the capacity of numbers’ to be a technique of both transparency and control

Conclusion

Findings

See at length: SANSW