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

Abstract

Economic 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.