Matthias Schmelzer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His areas of interests include transnational social and economic history, social movements, and the history of capitalism.

• Introduction; Setting the stage: a historical introduction to the OECD; Part I. Paradigm in the Making: The Emergence of Economic Growth as the Key Economic Policy Norm (1948–59): 1. Measuring growth: the international standardization of national income accounting; 2. Propagating growth: from reconstruction and stability to 'selective expansion' and 'productivity'; 3. 'Expand or die': international economic mandarins and the transnational harmonization of growth policies; Part II. Paradigm at Work: A 'Temple of Growth for Industrialized Countries' in Action (1960–8): 4. Power, progress, and prosperity: growth as universal yardstick and the OECD's 1961 growth target in perspective; 5. Boosting growth: the Western 'growth conscience' and policies in the name of accelerated growth; 6. Replicating growth: the 'development of others' and the hegemony of donor countries; Part III. Paradigm in Discussion: The 'Problems of Modern Society', Environment, and Welfare (1969–74): 7. Quantity in question: challenging the hegemony of growth and the OECD-Club of Rome nexus; 8. Reclaiming growth: organizational dynamics and the 'dialectic' of qualitative growth; 9. Quantifying quality: managing the environmental costs of growth and the difficult quest for 'gross national well-being'; Epilogue: paradigm remade (1975–2011); Conclusion: provincializing growth.

'In this well-researched intellectual and institutional history, Schmelzer brings to light the story of how Europe and America in the mid-twentieth century embraced the cult of Gross National Product (GNP), and the role of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the process. By devising the system by which governments keep economic score, economists and bureaucrats revised the goals of economic policy to emphasize, almost to the point of worship, GNP growth. Schmelzer's book explains lucidly how economic policy acquired its topmost priority of the past seventy years.' J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World