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)