Hi.
Are you familiar with the arguments by Ha-Joon Chang that the means by which now rich countries developed is pretty much the exact opposite of the means by which we are recommending and/or forcing other countries to develop?
If you are, what are your thoughts on his arguments?
If you're not, could you spare 70 minutes to
watch this and get back to me?
I think people don’t really want to talk about development as the messy, violent, and political process that it has been in the past and paint it as a sort of friendly, non-political process now based on geography, resources, and other material factors. Of course, nobody is saying to go start wars in the name of development, but there’s a big disconnect between what happened before and what people are trying to do now, and for better or for worse, a lot of these critiques are hitting on it.
As a tangent to this topic, you might be interested in an article by James Ferguson called "The Anti-Politics Machine" that attacks the so-called "development" discourse. It looks at a 1975 World Bank report on Lesotho and basically points out how it systematically mischaracterized the country and its history, with skewed or invented data in order to create a conception of "development" that was convenient yet unlikely to help.
The WB report stated that Lesotho was "untouched by modern development" and lacking a modern monetary economy, that it was a sort of egalitarian farming country, that its main problem was soil erosion and that with some projects in agricultural development, it could become a self-sufficient, self-contained economy. In other words, a perfectly non-political, self-contained approach to development. In addition to pointing out how much of the data is apparently fabricated, Ferguson attacks that the report wrongly treats such countries as singular economies that either do or do not have sufficient natural resources without taking into account the history and structural factors in play. For instance, the report completely ignored the fact that Lesotho was fully integrated into the modern capitalist economy and had been for a century, but as a labor reserve for South Africa. It was much easier, however, to simply say that Lesotho's problems were contained within its borders, such as soil erosion and declining agricultural yields (which also seemed to be pushed by the report).
One other report in the late 70s by a different organization argued that because Lesotho workers were earning high wages in the mines, this would lead to “superficial affluence” and a distraction from real development, so the solution was to make Lesotho workers focus on agriculture and farm their way to modernity instead of focusing on improving their labor standards and wages in the mines.
The problem is that there is a clear difference between what "development" means from a institutional perspective, and from a broader academic perspective. Ferguson argues that a lot of these organizations are trying to simply move money and they need to make a case for their existence in terms of these countries' situations. So it is convenient to say that these countries are simply "non-modern" and that they need to be connected to the world economy or that they need agricultural development projects, etc. Thus giving the World Bank a job to do. Talking about exactly why these countries are behind is a much messier operation and makes "development" quite difficult (e.g. talking about Apartheid in 1975?). There are all sorts of political issues of dominance, dependence, resources, etc. above and beyond the non-political objectives of "development" as it is known in the "development" circles, as opposed to an academic portrayal of what "development" really is.
What's that supposed to mean?
