Measuring Development: An Intellectual and Political History of Ludwik Landau’s Scale of World Inequality

Abstract

This article examines contributions of the chief economic statistician and socialist activist Ludwik Landau (1902–1944) that empirically investigated Poland’s underdevelopment in the framework of world capitalist economy. Landau pioneered a structural approach to measure the global gap between rich and poor countries in 1938–9, when such a synthetic view was largely unimaginable. Landau’s main work in international comparative statistics,World Economy, scholarly elaborated his socialist views on the necessity of non-capitalist development for Poland and other poor regions in agrarian Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that the Polish experience bestowed epistemic advantage in understanding the non-industrialised world and became a starting point from which to explore underdevelopment globally. This article concludes with a discussion of the political and epistemic significance of Landau’s work and how it figures in the larger history of development and statistical measurement of the world.