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.