ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the national income, but the new visibility extended to a much wider range of data, including statistics on health and population. A new global system of international institutions could compel the production of data according to their standards, and supervise national governments through it. The postwar period saw the creation of a three-level governmentality with national governments in the middle: sovereigns of their populations, but subjects of international organizations. The postwar system featured rapid decolonization, a shift from a world of empires to a world of formally equivalent sovereign nations. In classroom pedagogy, one first models a "closed economy" walled off from the rest of the world, with a government, financial system, firms, and consumers theorized as part of a self-sufficient, fully enclosed system. A rhetoric of discipline and punishment – for disordered people, families, and nations – structured the emerging world and international institutions.
