Abstract
The monetary value of the number of goods and services produced in a year is the main object of political attention (via gross domestic product), the amount of money accruing to citizens less so. Yet, this has not always been the case. Lepenies traces the reasons for this political shift in perspective—from people to products. He shows how the issue of inequality and income distribution was first sidelined and later deliberately neglected in the course of the triumph of gross national product and economic growth in post–World War II years. This helps to explain the frictions produced in recent times between rising inequality and the reluctance of Western politicians to acknowledge the issue, let alone take it seriously.
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Notes
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Ironically, it was Simon Kuznets who, as his views on measuring national income were no longer heard, concentrated, as one of the very few social scientists, on the investigation of inequality. See, for instance, his seminar paper from 1955, with the often misinterpreted inverted u-curve hypothesis (Kuznets 1955).
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Lepenies, P. (2019). Products Before People: How Inequality Was Sidelined by Gross National Product. In: Christiansen, C.O., Jensen, S.L.B. (eds) Histories of Global Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19163-4_4
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