In the mid-twentieth century, economists in countries like India, Iraq, and Lebanon that were poised to become or were newly independent were often coerced into adapting Anglo-American macroeconomic frameworks of calculating national income in order to form a structural picture of their “developing” economies. Implicit in this statistical method was the concept of a “production boundary” or an invisible border that discriminates between productive and non-productive economic activities. Only those activities that were considered “productive” in a capitalist sense, i.e. manufacturing, forestry, commercial agriculture were eligible to be measured. This instantiated a second wave of calculation debates among economists in non-aligned nations on how to measure predominantly agrarian economies. This was because the production boundary did not simply demarcate the realms of “capitalist” and “non-capitalist” economic activity, it also implied that activities that were not measured were developmentally inferior or “informal.” The production boundary also manifested spatially as the borders between the “formal” and the “informal” built environment. While in the household, it established a gendered boundary between “wage” labor and “reproductive” labor that socially and economically devalued “women’s work,” such as uncompensated childcare, cleaning, and farming for household consumption. Thus, while national income accounts were publicized as a doctrine of revelation after the Great Depression, they often functioned as a project of concealment. This paper, therefore, examines how the Iraqi economist-policymaker Khair el-Din Haseeb tried to seize the means of calculation in order to measure the Iraqi economy. One type of economic activity that was being concealed was the architectural production of rural migrants and cultivators in Iraq, specifically those who inhabited reed (sarifa) and mud (kukh) houses. This led him to conduct fieldwork in southern Iraq in 1957 and design a calculative framework that ascribed a “scarcity value” to rural architecture. Eventually appointed as the governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, Haseeb functioned as Iraq’s de facto economic czar in the 1960s as he directed the nationalization of large sectors of the economy. This continued until a coup in July 1968 resulted in his arrest and subsequent exile to Beirut. There, he founded and directed the Center for Arab Unity Studies that continued to advance a distinct pan-Arab economic and political project of integration that would not be subsumed by the developmental frameworks of neoliberal institutions founded in the early twentieth century that Haseeb’s initial research on national income in Iraq was trying to counter.