Donald McGranahan 1917-2001

Don McGranahan was that rare individual who combined scientific genius with administrative ability. Renowned for his work on social development in the 1950s and 1960s in what was then the Bureau of Social Affairs of the United Nations, he obtained from the Government of the Nether- lands a grant to set up a research institute. What is today known as the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has continued to function in Geneva as a kind of academic think tank with direct application to the daily work of the Secretariat. Founder of UNRISD, and its Director from 1967 to 1977, McGranahan recently died from cancer in a nursing home in the United States.

After meritorious military service in Europe during the second World War he continued his studies in experimental psychology at Harvard.He subsequently joined the Bureau of Social Affairs in New York under Julia Henderson, distinguishing himself through his work on the interrelations of economic and social development, described notably in the 1961 Report on the World Social Situation.As secretary of the Mahalanobis Expert Commit- tee on the measurement of levels of living standards and subsequent inter-agency meetings in the 1950s and early 1960s he laid the foundations of work in the United Nations on social indicators anticipating related work in the USA during the 1960s.The indicators he identified in the ‘International Definition and Measurement of Levels of Living: An Interim Guide’ have remained virtually unchanged to this day.

It was on the basis of the research on development profiles and indicators, and to be able to pursue this work, that he obtained a grant from the Government of the Netherlands to set up a social research institute within the United Nations. He finalised the organisational arrangements of UNRISD, wrote its terms of reference and subsequently joined it as Director in 1967.

The initial years of his directorship are generally associated with the glamour induced by the two Nobel laureates on the Institute’s Board, Jan Tinbergen and Gunnar Myrdal. There were others luminaries including Eleanor Sheldon, guiding spirit of social monitoring in the USA, Phillip Hauser, the eminent demographer and briefly Jacques Delors before he was claimed by the Common Market. Less widely appreciated is the hard work it took to mould these powerful but heterogeneous personalities into an effective instrument for the good of the Institute, to reconcile for example Tinbergen’s econometric interests with Myrdal’s flair for the practical.

The crucial factor in the end was McGranahan’s personality, his unswerving devotion to scientific ends, to the search for practical means of promoting social, in the service of overall, development. In the end, all – or anyway most – divergences vanished in the pursuit of knowledge. This was the case also as regards staff, each one a primadonna in the making, including two junior assistants who subsequently became ministers, and a renowned anthropologist later tried for the murder of his wife.

Prominent projects in the decade of McGranahan’s directorship, and which he personally directed jointly with staff, included research into the social implications of the Green Revolution, the role of co-operatives in development, the unified approach to economic and social development, indicators at the local level (a project suggested by Myrdal to test the relevance in real conditions of employment and other statistics in common use).

McGranahan’s own predilection was for the measurement of development and its application to social and economic analysis, work that he and his colleagues pursued mainly after normal working hours. They critically examined traditional concepts and data, rejecting what was clearly false (including some of the ‘manufactured’ statistics derived from models), and querying the indiscriminate application of popular statistical techniques. There resulted the volume, published well after McGranahan’s retirement: ‘Measurement and Analysis of Socio-Economic Development’, featuring development profiles (rather than aggregate indicators) based on correspondence analysis and a new concept of best-fitting lines, all of them remarkable innovations, although for lack of computer software now little used.

Personal memories remain, his personal kindness, refusal to accept per diem other than what he actually used for hotel and essential meals (the balance went into the Institute’s kitty for social use); his squash games with long-suffering colleagues three times a week before breakfast, and of a con- tented if, because of pressure of work, sometimes abridged family life. He leaves three children who in their scientific careers, are fully worthy of their illustrious father.

(Wolf Scott, former Deputy Director, UNRISD )