{"id":226436,"date":"2023-01-02T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=226436"},"modified":"2022-12-31T06:15:07","modified_gmt":"2022-12-31T06:15:07","slug":"the-failure-of-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/the-failure-of-development\/","title":{"rendered":"The Failure of Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the closing years of the 1940s, when World War II had ended and its winners were reorganizing human life on planet earth, many feared nuclear war.\u00a0 The delegates who met at San Francisco and founded the United Nations intended to organize lasting peace.\u00a0 Many feared the spread of Communism.\u00a0 Others feared the defeat of Communism and the definitive victory of capitalism.\u00a0 Except for a few outliers, like Mahatma Gandhi and his economist colleague J.C. Kumarappa, nobody feared the greatest danger of all: development.<\/p>\n

Although \u201cpeace\u201d and \u201csecurity\u201d were ideals named in the negotiations that led to the founding of the United Nations, \u201cdevelopment\u201d was not.<\/p>\n

However, conceived as the solution, not as the problem, \u201cdevelopment\u201d named an ideal that could keep the United Nations united. It solved the problem of keeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on board.\u00a0 It could be agreed by all, East and West. North and South, that there was more than one way to \u201cdevelop.\u201d \u00a0\u201cDevelopment\u201d was an outcome of capitalist accumulation.\u00a0\u00a0 But central planning, along with investment and accumulation by the state, could count as \u201cdevelopment\u201d too.<\/p>\n

The UN General Assembly held its first meeting in London on 10 January 1946.\u00a0 By the time the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its strong emphasis on social rights including the right to employment, in Paris on 10 December 1948, \u201cdevelopment\u201d was already \u201cthe new name for peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDevelopment\u201d became the name for bringing the \u201cunderdeveloped\u201d (later \u201cdeveloping\u201d) majority of the human beings on planet earth into the promised land where the \u201cdeveloped\u201d minority had already arrived.\u00a0 The \u201creconstruction\u201d of Europe would lead seamlessly to the \u201cdevelopment\u201d of Africa, Asia and Latin America.\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201cworld bank,\u201d had already been named as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumanity\u201d for most of history was not recognized as a united collective entity.\u00a0 After World War II, by common accord and express agreement, humanity was finally legally designated, in documents signed by representatives of all national governments, as a species with a common purpose.\u00a0 Its purpose was \u201cdevelopment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in those days few were aware of what today, on the second day of 2023, has become painfully apparent to all thinking people.\u00a0 Human life and all life might <\/em>be destroyed or nearly destroyed by an all-out nuclear war. Today, specifically, Russia, apparently with no better option, might and might not<\/em>, use tactical nuclear weapons.\u00a0 The use of tactical nuclear weapons might and might not <\/em>lead to the use of strategic nuclear weapons.\u00a0 An all-out nuclear might never happen. <\/em>Development, in contrast, has happened.\u00a0 It is still happening. \u00a0Development has created what is known as the Great Acceleration \u2013the take-off after World War II of measures of economic development going up and up in lock step with measures of ecological catastrophe also going up and up.\u00a0\u00a0 Development has already destroyed many species.\u00a0 It is on track to destroy the human species.<\/p>\n

Although the word \u201cdevelopment\u201d had a history before it was pressed into service to name humanity\u00b4s common purpose after World War II, I have been using the term evoking its post World War II meaning.\u00a0 I will now offer an interpretation of what that crucial latter day meaning has been and is.<\/p>\n

If you consult recognized experts in development associated with the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, such as Dani Rodrik, Ricardo Hausmann and Andres Velasco, you will learn two basic facts that they have emphasized in print in a jointly written text:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Whatever else development may also be, it is economic growth.<\/li>\n
  2. To get economic growth to happen, it is necessary to get investors \u201cexcited\u201d about investing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Bolivian economist Gabriel Loza makes a similar point:\u00a0 A theory of development is a theory of investment.<\/p>\n

    We are learning the meaning of a word by studying how it is related to what the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure called its \u201cneighbouring\u201d words.\u00a0 \u00a0We are learning about \u201cdevelopment\u201d relating it to its neighbours \u201cgrowth\u201d and \u201cinvestment.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Another neighbour is \u201cproductivity.\u201d \u201cProductivity\u201d explains why development gained a reputation as a noble humanitarian cause.\u00a0 \u00a0Development did not earn its reputation as another name for peace; nor did it earn its endorsement by the Vatican, and by staunch Scandinavian social democrats like Gunnar Myrdal, Trygve Lie, and Dag Hammarskjold because it was another name for profitable investments.<\/p>\n

    Development wore another hat and had another description.\u00a0 It was the name of the social compact ending the class struggle. The first world\u00b4s \u201cdeveloped\u201d economies showed the path to the \u201cunderdeveloped\u201d third world because \u2013back then\u2014development made it possible to fund human social rights.\u00a0\u00a0 Post-war social peace was pioneered when the working class soldiers who had fought Hitler — the men Franklin Roosevelt called \u201cthe four freedoms boys\u201d (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear) = — came home after defeating the Nazis. They did not come home to a continuation of the depression of the 1930s.\u00a0 They came home to nearly full employment, the welfare state, the GI Bill providing free tertiary education for veterans, and collective bargaining.<\/p>\n

    The key to social peace in the first world was believed to be high productivity.\u00a0 The poverty of the third world was believed to be caused, at bottom, by low productivity.<\/p>\n

    \u201cDevelopment\u201d was, and still is, a name for raising productivity.\u00a0 Getting investors excited about investing was and still is believed to be a practical means to the social end of shared prosperity.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes it is believed to be the only <\/em>practical means.<\/p>\n

    As 2023 begins, hard on the heels of the traumas of 2022 and 2021, the peaceful twenty first century envisioned in the imaginations of the founders of the United Nations has morphed into a fairy tale that did not come true.<\/p>\n

    In the first world productivity has gone up and up while social peace has gone down and down.\u00a0 Industry has moved to the third world \u2013so much so that the third world middle and upper class consumers who are in the market for expensive products now outnumber and outspend the first world consumers.\u00a0 The third world includes some of the most unequal societies including South Africa (Gini coefficient 63) Colombia and Saudi Arabia (54) Brazil (48.9) India (47) and China (46.6) \u2013making Brazil, India and China almost as unequal as the USA (Gini coefficient 49).<\/p>\n

    While \u201cdevelopment\u201d might have been <\/em>\u201cthe new name for peace,\u201d as history has played out in a world where, as J\u00fcrgen Habermas wrote, the market is the primary social reality and government is only a secondary social reality, and where, as Alan Greenspan remarked in more picturesque terms. \u201cIt hardly matters who is elected president. Markets run the world,\u201d \u201cdevelopment\u201d has proven to be in practice<\/em> mainly economic growth producing the Great Acceleration.<\/p>\n

    As 2023 begins, as polar icecaps are melting, as fires and wars are belching huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere triggering chains of causes that lead to more fires and more wars, and as desperate economic migrants are risking their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean to escape Africa and to enter Europe, the devil is demanding his pound of flesh.<\/p>\n

    I would suggest an agenda for survival with three imperatives that are difficult to achieve simultaneously:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Welcome the billions of people now oppressed, or completely rejected, by the labour market into the human family, organizing dignified livelihoods for all \u2013 giving priority to funding work to achieve Job One, namely restoring natural equilibria (for example planting trees).<\/li>\n
    2. Reconsider the \u201csuccess\u201d of the middle and upper classes who are destroying the planet enjoying irresponsible lifestyles, violating Kumarappa\u00b4s maxim: consume no more in a year than nature can replace in a year. This is both a high tech and a low tech challenge.\u00a0 The high tech part (for example the energy transition and circular economies) requires capital and intelligence.\u00a0 The low tech part (for example bicycles and soy burgers) requires a culture shift.<\/li>\n
    3. Bring down the birth rate to less than the death rate, reducing the number of human beings on the planet.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      One name for the general orientation of efforts to make a difference for good, given this sort of analysis of what humanity is up against, is \u201cunbounded organizing.\u201d\u00a0 To begin conversations, or rather to continue in the West conversations beginning with Socrates, in China conversations beginning earlier, in India still earlier, and elsewhere on dates I do not know, \u201cgood\u201d can be defined as \u201cmeeting human needs in harmony with nature.\u201d\u00a0 Or, in Carol Gilligan\u00b4s words, \u201cattending to and responding to needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

      \u201cUnbounded organizing\u201d (UO) refers to innumerable initiatives undertaken by people in all walks of life, in all sectors of the economy, without ruling out of the conversation a priori <\/em>any approach or any school of thought.\u00a0 The UO idea grew out of organizing experiences in Latin America and Africa. It is similar to Amartya Sen\u00b4s idea of \u201cpublic action.\u201d<\/p>\n

      It is no small matter that UO is among the contemporary schools of thought and practice devoted to working together to meet human needs in harmony with nature.\u00a0 Thomas Piketty (for France) C.B. McPherson (for the UK) Howard Zinn and more recently Katharina Pistor (for the USA) and others have shown that any such intention was far from the minds of the 18th<\/sup> century framers who designed the public institutions that became the models for virtually all modern republics.\u00a0 It is, sadly, not surprising that institutions that were not designed with the objective of meeting the needs of human beings, nor with the objective of living in harmony with nature, in fact \u2013as history so far has turned out\u2014do not do so.<\/p>\n

      Shocked by the horrors World War II, shocked by the holocaust, shocked by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, threatened by future horrors because of the beginning of the Cold War, there was hope that humanity finally learn to work together for peace. The future would be different from the past.<\/p>\n

      The United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the International Declaration of Human Rights promised freedom from want and freedom from fear.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 From the mid twentieth century forward the practice of honouring human dignity would keep the broken promises of the 18th<\/sup> century libert\u00e9, \u00e9galit\u00e9 fraternit\u00e9.\u00a0 <\/em>In what remained of the twentieth dignity would become physical; human dignity would mean good jobs, health care, and pensions.\u00a0\u00a0 The new name for peace would be \u201cdevelopment.\u201d<\/p>\n

      I have suggested that the rock that sank development, as an iceberg sank the Titanic, was investment.\u00a0 It turned out that there was little the UN could do, little governments could do, and little democracy could do to achieve development.<\/p>\n

      Everything depended on getting private investors excited about investment.\u00a0 Their excitement depended on ROI, return on investment. Everything depended on economic growth, and economic growth — purchased paying the price of social injustice– spells ecological disaster.\u00a0 The consolation, if there is one, is that if the Stalinists had won the Cold War and taken over the whole world, life would have been even worse than it is now.<\/p>\n

      But I think there is another consolation too: It is the growing influence of ethics of care, ethics of solidarity, ethics of dignity, ethics of responsibility, virtue ethics and ethics pursuing a truly worthwhile purpose in life.\u00a0 UO is an example.\u00a0 It is as if deep in their DNA and hormones, human beings had a singing moral compass that sang:\u00a0 if economics fails, if politics fails, if the rule of law fails, try ethics.<\/p>\n

      _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/a> <\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science <\/em>and<\/em> Research Professor of Philosophy at <\/em>Earlham College, Richmond<\/em>, Indiana<\/em>, USA<\/em>.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, a study of an application of Paulo Freire\u00b4s pedagogical\u00a0philosophy in rural Chile<\/em> (London Macmillan 1985); <\/em>Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is now available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook<\/em>.<\/em> howardri@earlham.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Although \u201cpeace\u201d and \u201csecurity\u201d were ideals that led to the founding of the United Nations, \u201cdevelopment\u201d was not. However, conceived as the solution, not as the problem, \u201cdevelopment\u201d named an ideal that could keep the UN united. It solved the problem of keeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on board. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[331,119,254,124],"class_list":["post-226436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-development","tag-peace","tag-security","tag-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}