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The nature of development lies in social integration

Henk Molenaar | 06 October 2011

This debate by The Broker on the promotion of human wellbeing and the transformation towards an inclusive economy is very welcome. In these times of frantic attempts to meet the debt crisis by kick-starting renewed growth, I applaud the pleas to free ourselves from growth fetishism and to develop different tools for measuring development than the gross domestic product. But to overcome growth as a central development paradigm, it is necessary to dwell on the characteristics of growth and the reasons why it has such a strong appeal.

Growth is a powerful concept that has a strong hold on our minds. In order to overcome growth as the main development paradigm, we need to demystify growth and understand its lure. Growth has undoubtedly created unprecedented wealth. But it comes with a price. Growth is a built-in necessity of capitalism that forces itself upon us as growth compulsion. Its lure is based on a distortion of our perception. We feel that growth allows us to satisfy our needs, and we fail to see that growth compulsion leads to the continuous multiplication of needs, the general spreading of scarcity, and the increase of inequality.

Unfortunately, alternative approaches of development lack the simplicity and intuitive clarity of growth and the GDP as its measure. Composite indices of various components of development merely display that we find it difficult to conceive of what development is, if not growth. We are in need of a single, powerful concept to rival growth as development paradigm. We may hope to find such a concept by looking at a dimension of life that is not based on the logic of accumulation and competition. By focusing on the social nature of human beings we can begin to conceptualize development as a process that is itself a social phenomenon, nested in relations rather than in individuals. This nature of development lies in social integration. Trust could be the marker of social cohesion, of which we need to capture its sociality and emotive power.

Read Henk Molenaar's worthwhile article on this topic, titled "Overcoming growth by focusing on social integration".

Photo credit main picture: Image by Luc Legay.

Comments

Towards development as trust?

Henk Molenaar changes our paradigm, from development as growth to development as trust. He sketches a far more realistic picture of human nature then the calculating homo economicus as proposed by the growth-theories. I embrace this view, but replacing growth by trust as the central concept for development theory still leaves me with several questions. Trust, networks and the social dimension already play a major role in economics. The other side of the coin of these relations is that they bring to the fore the dimension of power. This can lead to empowerment as well as coercion, patronage and exploitation. Can the theory of development as trust, counter this sufficiently?
From a heterogeneous point of view, trust and growth go hand in hand. The question is, why would we prefer this single-conceptual view over the heterogeneous approach? It is not only the simplicity of the growth theories that make it attractive. What also contribute to the attractiveness of growth is that we can standardize it, compare it, and display it in numbers. Trust cannot be represented in numbers in the same way. Furthermore, contrary to economic value added, trust cannot be measured in a culturally neutral way. Can we think of a way to standardize comparisons in trust? If not, this would actually challenge the positivistic-nature of the economics discipline.

Anna Alberts | October 18, 2011 | Respond

Development as Trust?

Henk Molenaar changes our paradigm, from development as growth to development as trust. He sketches a far more realistic picture of human nature then the calculating homo economicus as proposed by the growth-theories. I embrace this view, but replacing growth by trust as the central concept for development theory still leaves me with some questions. Trust, networks and the social dimension already play a major role in economics. The other side of the coin of these relations is that they bring to the fore the dimension of power. This can lead to empowerment as well as coercion, patronage and exploitation. Can the theory of development as trust, counter this sufficiently?
From a heterogeneous point of view, trust and growth go hand in hand. The question is, why would we prefer this single-conceptual view over the heterogeneous approach? It is not only the simplicity of the growth theories that make it attractive. What also contribute to the attractiveness of growth is that we can standardize it, compare it, and display it in numbers. Trust cannot be represented in numbers in the same way. Furthermore, contrary to economic value added, trust cannot be measured in a culturally neutral way. Can we think of a way to standardize comparisons in trust? Furthermore, this would actually challenge the positivist-nature of the entire discipline of economics.

Anna Alberts | October 18, 2011 | Respond

Clarity at all costs?

I concur with the author that we are in need of other concepts than growth alone to capture the essence of development. However I don’t think we would be very well served by yet another approach characterized by the “implicity and intuitive clarity” the author strives for.
First because this parsimony was exactly one of the reasons the economics failed so badly. It was not just that the reliance on GDP as an indicator of development or models in general did not capture what we are after, but also the very fact that we wanted to settle for one or two indicators only and a single understanding of the human being (i.e. a rational machine with perfect information at hand). Moreover, to argue that we need a better understanding of development for example through “social cohesion” (which is by itself already less clear-cut than GDP) will not capture the complexity of development since it is a very complex phenomenon, as the author admits himself. Indeed, this is the same line of critique articulated by Amartya Sen when discussing the Human Development Index. Although inspired by his capability approach and contributing to the establishment of the list himself, he has always been fully aware that so-called clarity should not come at all costs.

Wouter Kleijn | October 18, 2011 | Respond