On the Search for Well-Being

Epilogue: Another Great Question and More Ignorance

Epilogue: Another Great Question and More Ignorance The approach to development worked out in the preceding pages has built around several ideas. The basic idea is that development-the enhancement of well-being-means building from the institutions, values, technology, preferences that define the society seeking to develop. Development is necessarily an indigenous process. This approach is in contrast to that which emphasizes the replacement of these characteristics of the indigenous community by those from the North. This latter process is not, in my view, development. It is simply displacement. In the approach of this book great attention has been given to ignorance and hence to searching and learning, to the existence of variety among firms and households and hence to an intractable and continuing social choice problem, to the importance of institutions and ideas of the good life and of what is right and what is wrong, and the importance of learning from the North without trying simply to imitate the North. The displacement approach, on the other hand, intends specifically to make the country over in the image of the North. Complete openness to the North is paramount, foreign investment is actively encouraged, foreign advisors sought, foreign higher education is deemed vital, and technology is imported in order to make the economy internationally competitive. Market outcomes are always right or at least the best possible, so attention is given to getting and keeping prices right and the government minimal. There is no ignorance to worry about as the objective is imitating, not finding one's own way. (See footnote 12 in chapter 2 above.) Little attention is given to values and traditions and history and ethos because they interfere with the modernizing process. Foreign loans are to be sought from private banks and international organizations, and growth of the GDP per capita, with some attention to poverty relief, is given overwhelming prominence as the criterion of success. This latter approach is well illustrated by Singapore. Foreign firms dominate the Singaporean economy. There is virtually no unemployment, very little poverty, no illiteracy, excellent health care, and a per capita GDP that is now among the highest in the world and still growing rapidly. The saving rate is over 40 percent of GDP. The government is in firm control, is staffed by 201 202 On the Search for Well-Being well-trained, well-paid civil servants who have a clear vision of what Singapore should be. Singapore now has what many developing countries desperately seek, and what Singapore itself did not have a mere 40 years ago. Malaysia is a similar example, although not so spectacular as Singapore. Why then should not all countries follow the "modernizing" strategy and accept whatever comes from the North? Indeed, as is sometimes argued, the long centuries of unrelieved mass poverty in many countries of the world suggest strongly that such nations simply cannot develop in their own image, so they must do as the North has done or they are doomed to continuing hopelessness and despair. One of the main reasons that I wrote this book is that I find the displacement argument extremely disconcerting. It is an attractive, even alluring notion, but it is surely mistaken. I do accept it as worthy of attention and thought and study, and, of course, it is an argument pushed by highly responsible and astute students and policymakers and policy advisors. Thus the choice between the two approaches remains a great question about which we must still debate, for there remains great ignorance. ...