The World's Most Powerful Number: An Assessment of 80 Years of GDP Ideology

Economic measurements and indicators have their role to play in policy. However, as time passes, some of these indicators, like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), have come to shape our lives more than we can imagine. Here ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY invites Lorenzo Fioramonti, the author of two books on economic indicators, to reflect on the 80th anniversary of this indicator and invites Jane Guyer, a prominent economic anthropologist, to reflect on this article in the same issue in terms of her own work on the history of limitations of indicators in economic anthropology.