At the end of World War I, when the idea of a “world economy” took shape, economists on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the dream of establishing an economic world barometer. The seemingly mechanical working of new forecasting instruments seemed to allow for that dream to become reality. This paper investigates the cooperation between the members of the so-called Harvard Committee on Economic Research and European economists and statisticians in the 1920s. In 1919, the members of the Harvard Committee presented an index to the public, which promised to allow for the prediction of business conditions 4-10 months ahead. Fostered by the League of Nations, which actively promoted the expansion of the index in Europe and beyond, economists and statisticians all over Europe attempted to adopt the index in their respective countries, hoping to eventually establish a world barometer. The attempts and various meetings between American and European researchers, however, quickly revealed difficulties in adapting the barometer to other countries. Telling the story of the failure to create the first world barometer, the paper sheds light on the ambiguity between a global economy and various national economies that still lingers today.

The League of Nations Health Organization was created as policymakers grappled with the cataclysmic consequences of two pandemics: global influenza and typhus in Eastern Europe. Contemporaries drew one understudied lesson from those pandemics: the value of information, particularly statistics, to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The Polish head of the League of Nations Health Organization from 1921 to 1939, Ludwik Rajchman, believed fervently that statistics would “demonstrate the practicability and the indispensability of international health work,” perhaps by eliminating epidemics altogether. This paper traces how the Health Organization standardized the content and forms of epidemiological intelligence during the interwar period, how this solidified particular European understandings of disease, and why the Health Organization became the indispensable intermediary between territories whose notation systems had not been mutually comprehensible. Just as patient histories were standardized over the late nineteenth century, League officials sought to mold the numbers that they received. The boxes of submissions from 74 countries, colonies, or territories around the world show myriad methods to represent disease: narrative, drawings, maps, graphs, or tables with signs like circles or pluses that bear little resemblance to statistics today. League officials both solicited more statistics and pushed government officials to generate statistics that fit the League’s vision of how disease should be represented. I show how these initiatives fit into the League’s broader push to standardize financial and economic data. Finally, the paper explores how the League’s system directly laid the groundwork for the international health statistics of the United Nations.

The mathematical model of the U.S. business cycle that Jan Tinbergen and other economists employed by the League of Nations developed from 1936 to 1938 was arguably the first scientific representation of a national economy. This paper examines the relationship between this seminal model and diplomatic and ideological disputes that pervaded daily life for researchers at the League. Tinbergen’s methodology was a formal analogue of internationalism, the League’s predominant political philosophy. Internationalists assumed that the true character of phenomena was independent of specific national or cultural contexts, and that science could therefore be a force for unity and peace. Likewise, Tinbergen mathematically distinguished societal, cultural, or other so-called “structural” factors that might vary with time and place from the fluctuations of an abstract, idealized business cycle. Describing and predicting these fluctuations, he argued, was the purpose of the new science of econometrics. His methods satisfied the requirements of the League’s permanent staff, who sought to avoid the constant strategic conflicts among diplomats in Geneva by presenting scientific knowledge as disassociated from any one national point of view. Tinbergen’s work was an early example of how, later in the 20th century, certain claims about the character of economic life would enable economists employed by governmental agencies to present their advice as neutral and technical. The idea of the economy as an object of scientific investigation, predictable and universally accessible to researchers and observers regardless of their political allegiances, originated in part as a response to the intrigues of the League.

In the 1930s two studies were published by the League of Nations which both had a large influence on the development of economics. The first was a report on the theories of the business cycle by Gottfried von Haberler, the second one a statistical test of the various theories of the business cycle by Jan Tinbergen. This paper studies the institutional context in which these two studies, and in particular that of Tinbergen, were drafted. It argues that they are best understood as outcomes of joint work under the supervision of Alexander Loveday and Dennis Robertson, and with the help of various assistants, co-authors and expert committees. Although commissioned and published under the names of particular authors and typically understood as monographs, the studies are better understood as attempts to create expert consensus. This is demonstrated through a detailed study of the writing of the Tinbergen report. The process demonstrates at once the various co-authors and internal critics involved and the contested nature of virtually all aspects of the study, as well as the potency of this new collaborative teamwork without which the study would have been impossible. The fact that this report was meant to forge expert consensus means that the infamous critique by John Maynard Keynes of both studies should be understood, at least in part, as a challenge to the League of Nations as an institution, and this new type of consensual expert knowledge more broadly.