The Fruits of Blogging

I apologize in advance but this will be a bit of a disjointed post, I have a number of ideas roaming around in my head but they refuse to coalesce so I will leave that work for the reader.

1) A lovely quote from Small is Beautiful where Schumacher gives an interesting perspective on why aid is failing,

"In other words, we tend to think of development, not in terms of evolution, but in terms of creation.
Our scientists incessantly tell us with the utmost assurance that everything around us has evolved by small mutations sieved out through natural selection. Even the Almighty is not credited with having been able to create anything complex. Every complexity, we are told, is the result of evolution. Yet our development planners seem to think that they can do better than the Almighty, that they can create the most complex things at one through by a process called planning, letting Athene spring, not out out of the head of Zeus, but out of nothingness, fully armed, resplendent and viable."

Schumacher goes on to discuss about how the foundations of western society grew out of western education, organisation and discipline. These are all paradigms that do not "jump, [they are] gradual process[s] of great subtlety."

2) This term I am taking a course called "Management of Innovative Technology" which is mainly concerned with formalizing the inventive process and milking as much as you can out of your employees founded on the grow and expand economic model. I skipped ahead in the notes and found a section about technology in third world with some very interesting reports.
First of all a 2006 (the same year as Easterly's White Man's Burden) paper called "Funding Self-Sustaining Development: The Role of Aid, Foreign-Direct Investment and Government in Economic Success". Most of our readers probably will not have the incentive to read it so I will quote part of the abstract.

FDI [Foreign-Direct Investment], at best, has no effect on economic growth and actually slows the rate of human development in less-developed countries. We find no evidence that the degree of democratic respon-siveness in government conditions the effectiveness of either aid or FDI, although we do find that democracy independently increases human development in all but the most developed countries. Our results demonstrate that FDI and aid are not, and cannot be, substitutes in the development of the world’s poorer countries. Nor even can they be thought of as complements—certainly not at mid to low levels of development. In the end, poor countries need democracy and aid, not FDI.

Very interesting! Note that they do not critique aid as much as foreign investment but they do touch upon the fact that investment in the developing world is often presented as a higher, more sustainable and responsible level of aid. (The USA loves this approach.)

3) Reading up on Schumacher on Wikipedia led me to the Sustainable Development Portal. I'm surprised that I did not come across it sooner and that none of our readers took the time to tell me about it!

4) I was quite encouraged to find the Human Development Reports put out by the United Nations. It acknowledges that development cannot be solely measured with economic terms - something Schumacher would agree with entirely. Here's their heartwarming introduction...


Some housekeeping before I take my leave. Last week Jordan broke our record for most responses to a post (though many of them were offline) - please leave your comments on each post! They can be as short as, "You're wrong." or "Duh - you're just figuring that out now."
On the more constructive side, Jordan and I are very much enjoying Small is Beautiful but after we are finished with this book we will not have any specific topics to examine. Our request is that you, our readers, leave some comments about ideas that we've covered here or you've read about elsewhere that you would like to see covered a bit more.

Stay tuned next week for the heart of Small is Beautiful!

Kurtis (from Waterloo)

The White, the Comfortable, the Few

I will carry on directly from Kurt’s last post by restating one of his ideas. The pursuit of renewable energy seems often to be based on the assumption that we shouldn’t have to change our consumption habits. We want to keep buying, keep driving, keep producing as fast as ever (faster, if possible) forever. 

Schumacher (back to Small is Beautiful) goes further in suggesting that the modern view of progress rests in the belief that “universal prosperity is possible...on the basis of the materialist philosophy of ‘enrich yourself’ [and that] this is the road to peace”(1973:19). Kurt commented that the discovery of fossil fuels fueled a vision of the future where technology would help humanity overcome most, if not all, of its woes. Schumacher focuses on the idea that technology and unabated economic growth will result in peace and prosperity.

Taking off on that idea, I want to put forward the idea. The view from sunny North America, or the UK or Australia or Japan may be that technology and economic growth have lead to untold prosperity and even peace. Japan is a relatively peaceful country, right?  On the other hand Sierra Leone is excessively violent.   Once their economy starts to grow more and they can access more technology, the violence will go away, right? But is that the whole picture? What if we, the privileged few are living long lives with access to amazing medical treatments and cheap fuel at the expense of the majority who don’t have those things? I wonder if there is a violence inherent in the capitalist economic model that has helped create such a wonderfully privileged life for us, the white, the comfortable, the few?

Okay, I’m over-simplifying things, but I’m trying to make a point. I don’t see our current way of life or economic model as moving us toward peace and prosperity, at least not nearly all of us.

The question I propose to tackle in my dissertation asks: Can development projects undermine support for militant and terrorist groups and help bring about security and stability in strategically important areas? This question extends beyond my line of thinking above, but it’s built on the fundamental question: what is the relationship between economic development and stability, or peace?

Schumacher would likely argue that development of some sort could lead to stability for all (or most), but not the sort we were pursuing in the 70s.  Sadly, things haven’t changed a lot in 40 years.

Jordan (Manchester)

Actions & Beliefs vs Chickens & Eggs

Our reactions and thoughts coming out of Small is Beautiful will continue but unfortunately my copy ended up somewhere in central Wisconsin over the Christmas holidays. Nothing that the postal service cannot remedy but I will take this current opportunity to tie together a few threads that have emerged in my mind over the course of the blog. This post is more related to sustainability rather than development but I think with some thought the same thoughts could be extended to development attitudes and work.

Recently Jordan emailed about some other thoughts he was having about another book he is reading, "The Forgotten Way", by Alan Hirsch (2006). He quoted one passage,

"If discipleship has to do primarily with becoming like Jesus, then it cannot be achieved by the mere transfer of information outside of the context of ordinary lived life. As I will attempt to show below, I simply do not believe that we can continue to try and think our way into a new way of acting, but rather we need to act our way into new way [sic] of thinking. How have we moved so far from the ethos of discipleship passed on to us by our Lord? And how do we recover it again?"(2006:122)

The book and Jordan's email were more interested in spiritual matters but I would like to build on the second sentence of the quote concerning acting and thinking. I recently read an article about concerning behavior change and belief and a follow up article on Grist. The article ends with,

"Belief doesn't come first; action comes first. Changing people's behavior -- in small, incremental, but additive ways -- is the best way to open their minds to the science. It all comes down to change on the ground. Climate hawks need to get smart about driving behavior change wherever they can. Those behavior changes will pull changes in consciousness in their wake."

So now on to some of my own thoughts. For a long time I have wanted to post something about why I fear renewable energy so here it goes. It may be somewhat extreme, but try to imagine if tomorrow a researcher announced a super efficient renewable energy source. Anything from a new type of photovoltaic (solar) cell to a new hydrogen fuel cell or even some progress on fusion. This seems to be the underlying target for most investments and research in renewable energy and, as far as I can see, no one is asking the bigger question about the ramifications of such a discovery. When fossil fuels were first identified they were revolutionary. There's no question that the discovery of oil and its effect on the world (think automobile revolution as well as plastics) was incredible. The energy content in oil is incredible and the possibilities that it unleashed confirmed the opinions at the time that technology can and will solve all our problems and bring society towards utopia.

I think we tend to have the same attitudes towards renewable energy and the consequences might be just as dire. For example, can you imagine the rate of deforestation or resource extraction if we had portable cold fusion? How easy would it be to wage a war with super efficient solar panels powering the front lines? (A major consideration in modern warfare is the fuel supply line to the front line.)

Another interesting ramification might be more cultural. "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler is an interesting examination of how cheap oil has changed the face of North America. Cheap renewable energy would probably exacerbate the changes Kunstler observes. How much more separated with the haves be from the have-nots? How much more infrastructure will we demand to support an even cheaper energy source?

So now to tie these thoughts together. First, we have the idea that changing actions can change attitudes rather than trying to change attitudes in order to change actions. (Note that this is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem since the logical conclusion is that at least one person's attitude must be different in order to affect the behavior of others.) Secondly, I mentioned the idea that our current attitude towards renewable energy focuses our actions on reaffirming our attitudes or making them sustainable rather than changing them. For example, we are pursuing electric cars to allow us to keep our perspective on free and easy personal transportation.

I would like to conclude by saying that the economy could answer both of these questions. If we were somehow able to know and had to pay the true cost of every action we did (especially with regards to the environment) our actions would change immediately because we would not be able to afford our lifestyle. In the short term this would drive research towards technology that could solve these problems so that we could return to our current lifestyle. But before the breakthroughs came (if they ever did) our attitudes would have shifted to better understand a sustainable lifestyle.

Note that I said, "I would like to conclude,". Unfortunately, it is our current capitalistic paradigm that has given us these attitudes and the sort of logic that drives the previous paragraph. I suspect that simply having to pay (with currency) the full cost of our actions would really work to create a sustainable world. I look forward to continuing "Small is Beautiful" in order to further understand more of the underlying shortcomings in our economic system.

Kurtis (from Waterloo)

Development as if People Mattered

Since finishing my papers (last week) I’ve gotten back into reading E. F. Schumacher’s (1973) “Small is Beautiful:  A Study of Economics as if People Mattered”. I highly recommend this book to any of you. This is the first in a multi-part series of posts that Kurt and I plan to write in response to this book, because we are both committed to thinking about development as if people mattered.

 

For me, Schumacher’s most compelling thoughts are on the subject of education (1973:64-83). Granted, I’m only half way through the book. Education, has he saw it in industrialized countries in the 70s, whether in the natural sciences or the humanities fails not because of over-specialization, but because it fails to enable students to form clear convictions about the metaphysical implications of what they are studying. At this point, a longer quotation is justified to explain this idea:

“All subjects, no matter how specialized, are connected with a centre...constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us.  In other words, the centre consists of metaphysics and ethics, of ideas that – whether we like it or not- transcend the world of fact[s] [and] cannot be proved or disproved by ordinary scientific method. But that does not mean that they are purely ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’[.] They must be true to reality...an apparent paradox to our positivistic thinkers[.] Education can help us only if it produces ‘whole men’ [...one] who will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of life”(1973:77).

Why, in Schumacher’s view is it critical that education allow us to develop a value framework around our convictions about the purpose and meaning of life? Isn’t this viewed by some as a potentially dangerous thing, to hold convictions about the meaning of life or particular values? Shouldn’t these be kept to one’s self?  Indeed, it can be very problematic and harmful if one tries to manipulate facts and the world around him to fit a formulaic value system. But that is not what Schumacher is saying.  Value systems cannot be translated into rules and formulae to be passed on without reference to how life is lived.

Schumacher stresses the need, in education, to differentiate between ‘convergent’ and ‘divergent’ problems. Convergent problems can be solved by logical reasoning, such as many problems dealt with in the natural sciences.  Divergent problems defy logical reasoning.  These include problems faced in the context of “politics, economics, education, marriage, etc.”(81). While convergent problems lend themselves to fully transferrable, formulaic solutions, solutions to divergent problems involve reconciling seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

So let’s briefly examine a divergent problem.  I propose that one such problem is summed up in the question: why do some people stay poor?. There is a related question: “how can chronically poor people contest their poverty”? Development without a human face, like the economics without a human face that Schumacher opposes, treats these questions as convergent. Development without a human face develops formulae for poverty reduction.  For example, more aggregate economic growth will help [everyone] escape poverty. Schumacher argues that when convergent solutions are offered for divergent problems, the solution is always limited if not disastrous, because these types of solutions necessarily ignore one of the irreconcilable opposites inherent in divergent problems.

Living out solutions to divergent problems, such as the problem of chronic poverty, involves the very basic learning cycle of conjecture and refutation (Appadurai 2004). Conjecture is like stating an hypothesis. Acting on that hypothesis may result in refutation, the realization that what you’re trying doesn’t work the way you thought it would. What happens next, if you are fortunate enough to have the resources to do it, is you adjust your hypothesis and try again. And by repetition of this cycle, in the context of an enabling environment, you learn.  This should be intuitive if we think of how a child learns to do all kinds of things in life – indeed, how we as adults continue to learn about how to relate to other people, how to influence them, how to create consensus, how to make peace, how to nurture others. 

Going back to the example of Slum Dwellers International, I have read how their methods for contesting conditions of chronic poverty involve an outside NGO supporting the poor in this kind of trial and error learning (Patel 2004). This living process of living and learning promotes the development of a value system by the poor and enables a slow, organic praxis (the process of testing out ideas) through which the divergent problems of relationship, unequal politics and prejudice are gradually solved. This is development as if people mattered.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:

Appadurai, A. (2004) 'The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition' in Culture and Public Action, Vijayendra  R. & Walton, M. (eds), Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 61–84.

Patel, S. (2004) 'Tools and methods for empowerment developed by slum dwellers federations in India', Participatory Learning and Action 50, IIED, London.

Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Penguin, London.