The Sum of the Satisfactions: Canada in the Age of National Accounting

In our age of measurement, economic numbers - productivity, inflation, unemployment, gross domestic product - inform the decisions of both citizen and state. Since World War II, Canada has been at the global forefront in developing a set of national accounts that measure every beat of our economic pulse. The story of our national accounts - today administered by Statistics Canada - involves courage, personal tragedy, and a Canadian knack for innovation. Determined to banish the ravages of the Depression, win the war, and build a better post-war world, Canadian academics and mandarins applied the ideas of Keynes and Kuznets to the Canadian predicament - a highly regionalized nation interested in building a society that harnessed both the private and public sector to the goal of economic stability and increased national wealth. Today, Canadians know that they can trust the numbers put before them by their national accountants, numbers that support the working culture of our economic citizenship. Paul Samuelson, Nobel laureate in economics, has described national accounting as the great invention of the twentieth century.
National Business Book Award-winning historian Duncan McDowall now shows how Canadian statisticians have been in the forefront of using numbers to build a better economic world.