This article explores the history of a conceptual world economic order of nations created by statistically minded economists over the last seventy years. Drawing upon work by Colin Clark, Richard Stone, and Simon Kuznets from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it reconstructs the rise of new economic indicators referring to economic inequality. Two forms of intellectual practice can be identified that characterized a remarkable shift in knowledge production in Anglo-American economics in the period of French and British imperial decline. One was new methods of counting and comparing income, which produced a sensational new view of the world as a place of enormous poverty. The other was the belief that these issues could be solved by applying a limited set of policy recommendations to all economies in the world.

The ideas on development issues of two ‘pioneers in development’, Raúl Prebisch and Gunnar Myrdal, are tracked in their formation and evolution. The central role of these two ‘defiant bureaucrats’ in the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) and the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) are used to reflect on the interaction between intellectuals and international institutions in different historical contexts. Both men represented a liberal–universal strand in development thinking. Their divergent conclusions and assessments of the role of international institutions are compared, and are related to their different origins in core and periphery. It is argued that such roots influenced two different approaches to development problems within the UN system.

According to most reconstructions of development debates, poverty and social issues were not part of the development agenda until the late 1960s. In contrast, this article shows that development practitioners and institutions were already addressing poverty and social issues in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, economic multilateral organizations soon marginalized those inclusive views and focused exclusively on economic growth. This article discusses those early policy options and why they were marginalized. It argues that this happened for ideological reasons, specifically because of the ideological anti-New Deal post-war backlash and the adhesion of Western countries and multilateral organizations to what Charles Maier defined as the politics of productivity. This ideological backlash explains the rise and early demise of Keynesian ideas in international organizations, and, conversely, their stronger influence in developing countries, where the direct influence of the US and Bretton Woods organizations was somewhat mitigated.

This article focuses on the connection between the ideology of neo-Malthusianism and development theory and practice from the mid 1940s to the present. First identified by a few demographic experts, population policies and family planning gradually turned into a global movement for the control of world population. From the beginning, population discourses and policies were intertwined with strategies of socioeconomic development. They were also a reflection of strategic concerns and deliberations about the role of the West in the Cold War and vis-à-vis the emerging Global South. Focusing on the collective impact of individual choices, population controllers assumed that top-down approaches could swiftly change reproductive behaviour. They gave priority to preventing births over health, education, and female empowerment. Family planning began to shift its emphasis from the collective to the individual only in response to outright coercive actions and with the emergence of new actors, most notably feminists, from the late 1970s on.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of a new model of global food politics. This model was strongly moulded by the experiences of the Great Depression and the two world wars, all of which had brought hunger and malnutrition back to Europe. Whereas until the nineteenth century famines and food shortages had commonly been interpreted as regional Malthusian crises, they were now attributed to global economic disturbances and imbalances. This article explores how the far-reaching plans of a World Food Board, advocated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization under John Boyd Orr, were abandoned and supplanted by a new approach that focused on technical aid and the distribution of surpluses. Moreover, the problems of hunger and malnutrition were embedded in a larger discourse on world population and economic development.

This article studies the activities of American philanthropic foundations in India between the 1950s and 1970s. It discusses why private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation felt committed to responding to problems of hunger and population growth abroad and how they managed to establish themselves as leaders in the development aid arena. Instead of considering the foundations as handmaidens of US national strategic interests shaped by the Cold War, the article argues that they should be understood as highly flexible transnational agents who, in an ambitious combination of philanthropic motives, institutional interests, and trust in the power of science, diagnosed political problems and developed methods to overcome them in order to reduce global inequality.