"A Narrative of Conviction: The Rise of Indicators of Economic Growth in Authoritarian Brazil, 1960s–1970s"

This paper examines the adoption of macroeconomic indicators of growth as part of a narrative of conviction employed by the military regime in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. This narrative was designed to manage collective expectations regarding the government’s capacity to govern the economy to help fulfil the promises of economic recovery and stabilization. It traces how the military regime mobilized indicators such as the GDP, the GNP, and national income to foster investment allocation in key sectors, encourage savings, and focus consumption on material goods, thus fulfilling some of the expected conditions for an economic takeoff. It did so by capitalizing on indicators’ capacity to enable governance by numbers, particularly their ability to focus collective aspirations by mobilizing the emotions they elicited, thus anchoring narratives of growing prosperity on more than quantitative information. The paper examines how knowledge brokers supported public confidence in the numbers and related instruments of quantification—particularly the metric of ‘rate of growth’ and its related projections—publicized in magazines, newspapers, and radio and tv programs targeted to the new urban middle and the business classes. These included the widespread adoption of data visualizations to highlight the affective and imaginative dimensions of governance by numbers as a strategy to teach audiences how to govern their expectations and the imagined futures they articulated. Finally, the paper traces the regimes of futurity that competed for prominence during the adoption of these indicators, and explores the relationship between economic narratives and economic knowledge as tools of authoritarian government. By looking at the emergence of indicators of economic growth as the central element in a narrative of conviction associated with the rise of a technocratic developmental state in Brazil, the paper traces the elusive origins of the neoliberal governmentality, foregrounding Latin America’s agency in shaping a global regime.