Yet, "differences in people's capacities and attitudes and in their institutions are far-reaching and deepseated and largely explain differences in economic performance and in levels and rates of material progress" (Ibid., 313–14 emphasis added).īauer's critique thus draws attention to the need to study both the centuries of European history antedating the Industrial Revolution and "the interrelationships between social, political, and legal institutions" in that period (Ibid., 277). (Ibid., 219–20) 1Īt the root of the approach criticized by Bauer there appears to be a methodological holism that prefers to manipulate aggregates while ignoring individual human actors and the institutions their actions generate. These attitudes and institutions had emerged gradually over a period of eight centuries. By then the west was pervaded by the attitudes and institutions appropriate to an exchange economy and a technical age to a far greater extent than south Asia today. It is misleading to refer to the situation in eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Europe as representing initial conditions in development. (Ibid., 326)Įven when a writer appears to approach the subject historically, concentration on quantifiable data to the neglect of underlying institutional and social-psychological factors tends to foreshorten the chronological perspective and thus vitiate the result: The result has been models of development with little connection to reality:Ībilities and attitudes, mores and institutions, cannot generally be quantified in an illuminating fashion.… Yet they are plainly much more important and relevant to development than such influences as the terms of trade, foreign exchange reserves, capital output ratios, or external economies, topics which fill the pages of the consensus literature. #Opus domini homeschool group professional#Too many writers in the field have succumbed to professional overspecialization combined with a positivist obsession with data that happen to be amenable to mathematical techniques. But many of the most widely publicized writings on development effectively disregard both the historical background and the nature of development as a process. The historical background is essential for a worthwhile discussion of economic development, which is an integral part of the historical progress of society. In canvassing the work of other theorists, Bauer has complained of their manifest "amputation of the time dimension": Bauer is noted both for the depth of his historical knowledge, and for his insistence on the indispensability of historical studies in understanding the phenomenon of growth (Walters 1989, 60 see also Dorn 1987). Among writers on economic development, P.T.
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