Hinrich, Thanks for the references. I wasn’t thinking of the LSE ideology so much in the first instance, as of the Stiglitz Commission. It is useful to have that material though since I still have to write up a paper about that whole issue. Some ideas I had long ago have never been published anywhere in a journal.
As regards myself, I studied the German material you mention thirty years ago. After that I worked for many years at a comprehensive analysis and reworking of macroeconomic and social statistics, including the SNA system and the history of national accounting. Subsequently I worked as research statistician for a statistics office and did a course in BoP statistics. So the material to which you refer is a really bit simple for me now. In my experience, there is only a small group of Leftists in the world who really know about national accounts in a technical sense, never mind the critique of national accounts. But they’re not alone – about 99% of the world population doesn’t have a clue about that. The way that macroeconomics is taught now, nobody actually learns properly about the national accounts, so the whole knowledge-base is degenerating. In addition, the IMF keeps changing the concepts of the SNA system to make them more amenable to the financiers, resulting in data of dubious value. Today’s Left is anti-growth, but I am pro-growth. The Left is against measurement of economic growth, I am for measurement of economic growth. So really I don’t have much in common with the Left anymore in that regard. I am a bit oldfashioned I guess. I believe that if you want to distribute goods, you have to produce them first, and you have to earn what you consume. J.
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