Major Antedating of "Gross National Product"

[Victor Steinbok]

The following is a decade later, but it points to the fact that the term
existed long before WWII:

Value of the Gross National Product and Its Components, 1919-1929
Clark Warburton
Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 29, No. 188 (Dec.,
1934), pp. 383-388

I don't see any problems with the 1923 citation, unless the date refers
to the publication year of supplement 1.

I verified the citation above and it certainly comes from the December
issue for 1934. Of course, this could just mean that the term "Gross
National Product" became important during and after the Great Depression.

Now, I have the article in question in front of me and there is no
question that the article introduces the idea of the "gross national
product".

Wage Theories and Wage Policies
John R. Commons
The American Economic Review
Vol. 13, No. 1, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth
Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (Mar., 1923), pp.
110-117

On p. 110 (the first page of the article),

> According to the theory of prosperity the nation, by its laws and
> customs, proportions inducements to various classes of producers and
> non-producers in such a way as to augment or retard the /gross/ income
> of the nation.

Note that the introductory language differs from the subsequent term.

The quoted text in question occurs on p. 112, exactly as stated.

In fact, the JSTOR subset to which I have access contains no other
citations that refer to "gross national product" between these two,
although there is quite a number of them /after/ 1934 (between 1935 and
1947, that is).

OED dates "gross domestic product" to April 14, 1951 issue of the
Economist. Here's another citation from JSTOR from about the same date.

Indices of Wholesale Prices
J. Stafford
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) , Vol. 114,
No. 4 (1951), pp. 447-467

p. 464
> Just which product concept they would refer to would depend on how /h/
> was defined, but most conveniently it would the gross domestic product
> at market prices.


     VS-)



On 7/6/2012 6:09 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> I am pretty sure this is a bad date.
>
> The NBER did research into income. I doubt anyone called its work research
> into gross national product as early as 1923.
>
> DanG
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
>> This is a powerful example of the difference between online-database-assisted antedating and traditional methods.  There are many other pre-1947 occurrences in JSTOR.
>>
>>
>> gross national product (OED 1947)
>>
>> 1923 John R. Commons in _American Economic Review_ 13: Supplement 112 (JSTOR)  The National Bureau of Economic Research has started the accurate measurement of our  gross national product and its distribution into national income.
>>
>>
>> Fred Shapiro

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