Measuring development: An intellectual and political history of Ludwik Landau's scale of world inequality

Abstract

This article examines contributions of the chief economic statistician and socialist activist Ludwik Landau (1902-1944) that empirically investigated Poland's underdevelopment in the framework of world capitalist economy. Landau pioneered a structural approach to measure the global gap between rich and poor countries in 1938-9, when such a synthetic view was largely unimaginable. Landau's main work in international comparative statistics, World Economy, scholarly elaborated his socialist views on the necessity of non-capitalist development for Poland and other poor regions in agrarian Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that the Polish experience bestowed epistemic advantage in understanding the non-industrialised world and became a starting point from which to explore underdevelopment globally. This article concludes with a discussion of the political and epistemic significance of Landau's work and how it figures in the larger history of development and statistical measurement of the world.