An “Official Concept of Progress”? Three Classic Debates on Expertise
Q&A with John Toye
The idea of an “Official Concept of Progress” is intriguing. Where does it come from?
This all starts in 1951 with a UN report called Measures for the Economic Development of Under-developed Countries. It was the first pronouncement of the United Nations on these issues, and quickly acquired a special status in the literature on economic development. The report was seen as a repository of conventional wisdom on economic development: a blueprint for what countries should be doing.
The authors were an expert group led by W. Arthur Lewis, then a young lecturer at the University of Manchester. It was a product of the expert-group style of working, where reports tend to reflect the views of the person drafting. Though written to create a consensus, the report attracted a series of skeptical challenges.
The earliest challenge came from S. Herbert Frankel, a South African economist. He derided the UN Report as ‘something like an Official Concept of Progress’. Like Arthur Lewis, Frankel had been born and brought up in a less-developed country and had come to Britain to study economics at the LSE. At that time there were very few scholars that had experience of less developed countries, and so Lewis and Frankel were unusual. But that’s where the similarity ends: they came from different backgrounds and on the whole had very different views on development.
Lewis was born and brought up in Antigua, where his parents were school teachers, and he thought education and saving were critically important. Frankel had made a living in the grain trade in South Africa. He thought that economic problems in South Africa were caused by the Government’s excessively rapid measures to expand development, largely through mining. He was conscious that South Africa’s economic development was bound up with wider political and social issues and did not proceed simply by the investment of capital under normal competitive conditions. What’s more, Frankel feared that these measures were pushing South Africa in a racist, authoritarian direction.
How did Frankel and Lewis understand the concept of progress? Was there an “officially agreed” common indicator for progress?
For both Frankel and Lewis, progress was seen in terms of outcomes — i.e. what inputs and outputs do you need to get certain outcomes. Lewis never defined what he meant by development — he assumed everyone would know. But he had an economistic view of matters, and so would have taken a rise in GDP per head as a proper indicator for progress.
Frankel had spent most of the war refining the national statistics of GNP per head — his professional work had been on this kind of measure of development. But he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t adequate. Like Dudley Seers, he was conscious of what GDP per capita couldn’t tell you. Lewis, on the other hand, had complete faith in the power of capital. That was why Frankel was so outraged by the report — given the South African experience he couldn’t agree that rapid economic change was a desirable policy goal. However, the report was accepted by most UN countries over the next few years, and also gained support from institutions such as the Ford Foundation.
As such, the debate was a win for Lewis overall — but he side-stepped Frankel’s critique, saying that he’d responded to what the UN wanted: he was just an academic expert and these were his answers. It was a disingenuous response — he was known to have promoted a radical development agenda in a former role at the British Colonial Office.
The result of him dodging the question was that there was no decisive debate about the substance of the report, and the “Official Concept of Progress” was left vulnerable to renewed assaults.
Can you tell me more?
The first significant re-examination of the adequacy of expert advice seemed to be in the “Two Cultures” debate — the 1959 Rede Lecture given by the novelist and chemist C.P. Snow.
The lecture foregrounded Snow’s concern about the cultural gap between scientists and literary intellectuals, but it was just as much a debate about global inequality and economic development. In short, about whether poor people could become rich by following the recipe the UN report had suggested.
The “Two Cultures” had a remarkable view of the potential for applied science, technical advances and scientific experts to lead economic development worldwide. How was it received?
Snow had been trained as a scientist, and had a very strong belief in the power of science to bring about development. Despite the seemingly ambiguous title, Snow’s lecture gave full expression to the beliefs about applied science, industrialization and poverty reduction that had been popularized by the UN report.
But the role of scientific experts was called into question once again. The first major public debate about the lecture was between Snow and F.R. Leavis, the literary critic. Leavis felt that one had to look to literature to learn about values, and that the writings of the best novelists were a very good guide to how life should be lived. ‘The great tradition’ of authentic literary voices enunciated values that were all you needed to know. He felt the values of scientists were superficial — for Leavis, scientists prioritized the application of science rather than values, and were thus socially irresponsible. Scientists went on discovering things, handing ideas to technologists, sometimes with terrible results. This critique was strengthened after the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs. Leavis felt scientists went with the flow of military needs, and that there was no control over their activity. That Snow should pop up and tell us how the world should be organized exposed shallow thinking about social issues, and ultimately left Leavis unconvinced.
Was this mirrored by wider criticism of the sciences? Or modern technology?
Faith in technology was cooling. There was also a developing critique of the correct methods of establishing scientific discoveries from philosophers of science such as Popper and Kuhn. And, a few years later, the publication of Limits to Growth kicked off a new debate about expert advice on economic development — i.e. the debate about what growth is sustainable and what is not.
Then, in 1973, came the publication of Small is Beautiful by “Fritz” Schumacher. Its central message was the need for widespread access to economic opportunity in a human-friendly form.
Schumacher was Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board, but he slowly transformed himself from an applied economist into a philosopher of development, and joined the chorus of criticism of C.P Snow’s ideas. His basic objection to Snow’s veneration of science was that, although scientific knowledge was useful in practical ways, it could not produce the moral values needed to control its own activities, so it must be made subordinate in any educational curriculum to philosophy and literature.
For Schumacher, the use of the money metric to reduce all types of economic activity to components of an aggregate GDP, the growth of which had to be maximized, obliterated fundamental distinctions of kind between and within economic sectors. Failure to recognize the distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources led to unsustainable growth plans. The goal of what he called “healthy development”, he concluded, required a profound reorientation not just of conventional economics, but also of science and technology.
How then should science and technology support this new vision of development?
Schumacher argued against what he called “giantism” in industry. He wanted more human-sized technology, an “intermediate technology” that was a half-way point between giant processes and traditional methods. But it’s important to note that, for Schumacher, this was an economic question rather than a technological one: His concern was that the units of organization for economic activity should be on a scale suitable for the human beings that worked in them, and that the technology in use should be affordable to individual workers. The conventional view was that bigger is better, so it was surprising that a lot of people — even economic experts — rallied around Schumacher, and signed up to the new Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), which reflected Schumacher’s practical philosophy of finding out what people are doing and helping them to improve it.
With the benefit of hindsight, many types of development have been found to be unsustainable. What does that mean for the concept of sustainability? And what does it mean for researchers and experts?
That’s true. The idea of sustainability is always limited by the fact that we can’t see the future. We don’t know what it will bring in terms of demand, and we don’t know what resources will be available in the future. As researchers, we need to distinguish between “sustainability” in the aggregate (a sustainable economy) and what is sustainable in certain sectors. For example, we don’t have to make massive assumptions to understand that the overuse of certain pesticides is leading to the decline of bees. You can be more certain and have to make fewer assumptions if you look at specific parts. And it’s often easier to say what’s not sustainable.
We started this interview looking at expert advice on economic development from over 65 years ago. What — if anything — has changed since then?
The cult of the expert per se is still alive and well. Economists have lost some of their credibility as experts, but climate scientists have joined them as purveyors of specialist knowledge and advice.
Nonetheless, faith in experts has somewhat eroded since the 1960s and 1970s. Dislike of experts seems to have grown even stronger, as part of a wider process of the advance of populism and celebration of ignorance. The question is why: Is it to do with polarization of incomes? Is it a protest? It doesn’t seem to be accompanied by much serious thinking about social progress or equality.
The UN is still in charge of the “official” concept of progress, but with a different emphasis. Recent initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals have focused more on the eradication of poverty than economic development (though, of course, development implies reducing poverty). There is a new emphasis on a broader notion of development driven by those who criticized GDP as a measure of welfare; a better appreciation of the importance of the use of renewable resources rather than ecologically damaging ones; and a greater sense of urgency about organizing collective action.
The critics did not win all of their battles, but they did make these important gains.
John Toye is Chair of the Advisory Panel of the Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. He is also a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
His research interests include public finance, the political economy of development, international economic institutions and the history of economic thought. After teaching development economics at Cambridge University in the 1970s, he became successively a professor of development economics at the universities of Wales, Sussex and Oxford. He has also worked for the United Nations (Director of UNCTAD 1998–2000). His books include Aid and Power: the World Bank and Policy-based Lending (1991), The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance and Development (2004) and Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in Development Theory and Policy (1987). He was Managing Editor of the journal Oxford Development Studies from 2005 to 2009.
