The 'Consumer-Minded' economist : Persia Campbell and consumerist developmentalism

Abstract

Persia Campbell (1898-1974) was a significant but unheralded female internationalist and economist whose career spanned four continents and six decades. An Australian who lived in the United States from the late 1920s, Campbell was a well-known and highly esteemed figure, whose interventions in development discourse carried force and authority. Drawing upon her expertise in consumer economics, Campbell propounded a ‘consumerist developmentalism’ that inverted the prevailing producerist wisdom of postwar economic development. This is not to say that she advocated consumerism, but rather that her work was premised on the belief that consumer wellbeing—not producer outputs—should occupy centre stage within development discourse and practice. Consumerist developmentalism essentially saw living standards replace national income accounting as the preeminent measure of progress. In Campbell’s career we can thus find an alternative genealogy of postwar development that sits at odds with prevailing narratives of male experts positing increased GNP as the ‘silver bullet’ to the world’s problems.