particular with questions of economic worth or value; indeed, what Michel Callon and Koray alkan have called

the economization of society has advanced to such an extent that the former (value per se) is very often reduced to the latter (economic value).25 Moreover, our preoccupation with economic worth has become almost an obsession where the more specific matter of measuring such worth quantitatively is concerned. And this, of course, is where national accounting and measures such as GDP come into their own. Because they provide measures of economic output, and especially because they enable different industries or sectors relative contributions to output to be quantified this sector represents half of our national economy, that sector only a quarter, and so forth the national accounts have come to represent a perfect vehicle for the ongoing enactment of our obsession. As I demonstrated in the introduction, we draw upon GDP data repeatedly and religiously to prove an activitys economic and, thus, broader social worth. Indeed, the authority that such mobilization accords to GDP data explains precisely why the former French President Nikolas Sarkozy focused explicitly on this metric in his underappreciated critique of both our cult of figures and the cult of the market that infuses it.26 Before moving on to consider the particular circumstances of national accountings origins, and the question of how measures such as GDP are generated by national accountants, one more key point needs emphasizing. This is that the national accounts are not only a principal vehicle for the performance of our obsession with economic worth. They also, to some degree, created this obsession in the first place or at least allowed it to materialize and to take the form it ultimately did. It may seem strange to the contemporary reader, but in the first half of the
ENCLOSING