Read a short excerpt from THE POWER OF A SINGLE NUMBER: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF GDP, by Philipp Lepenies, in which he tells the story of how Simon Kuznets got his conception of national income into the 1933 edition of the Encyclopaedia Of The Social Sciences.

Read a short excerpt from ECONOMIC THOUGHT: A BRIEF HISTORY, by Heinz Kurz, in which he gives a quick explanation of John Maynard Keynes’s “principle of effective demand.”

Read “What It’s All About: A Short Primer on GDP,” the introduction to THE POWER OF A SINGLE NUMBER: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF GDP, by Philipp Lepenies.