I just spent a couple of days at an excellent conference, The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Indicators, organised under the new Fickle Formulas programme led by Prof Daniel Mügge of the University of Amsterdam. Authors of several of the wave of books about GDP itself were there: me (GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History), Philipp Lepenies (The Power of a Single Number), Lorenzo Fioramonti (Gross Domestic Problem) and Dirk Philipsen’s (The Little Big Number). We also had with us Tom Stapleford (The Cost of Living in America), Brett Christophers (Banking Across Boundaries) and Yoshiko Herrera (Mirrors of the Economy) and Florence Jany-Catrice (The Social Sciences of Quantification) (and also Faut il attendre la croissance?)

It was also a great conference for hearing speakers refer to other books. I’ve already read Matthias Schmeltzer’s The Hegemony of Growth and  Ehsan Masood’s The Great Invention. Classics were mentioned, such as Alain Delarosière’s The Politics of Large Numbers. There were others I definitely need to have a look at. The New Global Rulers, for instance. Jacob Assa’s The Financialization of GDP. Paul Edwards’ A Vast Machine. I did feel the most orthodox of the multi-disciplinary crowd; the other economists would mainly describe themselves as heterodox, I think, and there were moments when I played ‘neoliberal’ bingo, so often was the term used. Good for me, no doubt.

The woods at the Drakenburg conference venue in Hilversum