Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General on his speech at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, April 28, 2020 challenged world leaders to use the coronavirus pandemic to “rebuild our world for the better” by also working together to tackle other global threats such as climate change. The outbreak that has resulted in at least 200,000 deaths and almost 3 million infections globally caused widespread economic hardship as countries impose lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus.
“It has exposed the fragility of our societies and economies to shocks,” the United Nations chief said, adding that “the only answer is brave, visionary and collaborative leadership. He continued: “Let us use the pandemic recovery to provide a foundation for a safe, healthy, inclusive and more resilient world for all people”.
FDAI intends to contribute to the discussions on what should the new economy look like. FDAI lifts from the chapters/pages of the book titled Full Humanity Development: A Discourse on Ends and Means written by its Executive Director, Rex T. Linao, PhD.
This is 2nd of the series, featuring Chapter 4 of the Full Humanity Development book. The graphics above is lifted from https://be1inspired.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/modernization-theory-is-it-works-case-study-south-korea-and-japan/
IT is important to fully know the true nature of the mainstream development paradigm in order to come up with knowledgeable critique as to the same (paradigm’s) impacts to the society, ecosystem, and people’s spirituality. This Chapter is devoted for that purpose.
The mainstream development paradigm – named Modernization Paradigm – is characterized by the following (see also illustration below):
The first characteristic of Modernization Paradigm finds expression in the notion of Linear Stages of Growth, which the economic historian Walt W. Rostow articulated in his book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960, pp. 1-12). Accordingly, Rostow identified five stages of growth:
The Traditional Society is principally a subsistence economy in which production of basic crops is the top priority. Production of economic surpluses is only minimal. Others are even left hungry. These predicaments are the natural outcomes of the situations that are characterized by technological paucity, lack of understanding of the physical environment, and the prevalence of traditional values and attitudes.
The Pre-Conditions for Take-Off witnesses at least three changes as a consequence of certain exogenous factors that include some external intrusions by advanced nations into a lagging society. The changes are in the area of agriculture that is being modernized, the formation of social overhead capital mostly seen in the improvement of transport, and the initial successes obtained in trading with other countries. The said changes are made possible by the presence of some institutions facilitating the process.
The Take-Off witnesses a sustained and substantial rise in product per capita, the modernization of institutions, and the emergence of one or more sectors that experience high rates of growth.
The Drive to Maturity is characterized by the maximization of the benefits of modern technology in all sectors. At this stage, all productive sectors are fully modernized. The economic gains successfully outstrip population increase; a changing work structure; a change in character of leadership in industry; and a rise in real income per capita that leads to workers having more discriminating taste for goods and services as well as their demands for greater efficiency of the government in delivering basic services.
The Age of High Mass Consumption suggests that the society is at the pinnacle of economic success. It can now provide its ordinary citizens with all the amenities and the conveniences of modern life. At this stage, the linear stages theory assumes that all citizens have increased security, welfare, and leisure and have access to multiple goods and services for their consumption. Their advanced way of life has become a model by people from other countries, making their lifestyle a status symbol on an international scale.
The Stages of Growth was presented by Rostow not as mere description, not as mere generalization concerning factual observations about the sequence of development of modern societies. As Rostow argued: they have an inner logic and continuity … They constitute in the end, both a theory about economic growth and a more general, if still highly partial, theory about modern history as a whole.
Rostow’s theory finds support from the Harrod-Domar Growth Model which was developed by Roy Harrod and Evesey Domar. The logic of the model is simple – – as long as a country saves and invests; economic growth is likely to take place (Todaro, 2000, pp. 80-83). Then there is Daniel Lerner who emphasized that somehow, somewhat; the Western influence could be felt everywhere, anywhere in the world. He remarked: Everywhere, the passing of traditional lifeways is visible. Indeed, the road to modernization is inevitable.
The second characteristic of Modernization Paradigm, the Western Model is the only model to which countries should aspire, is evident in the Universalizing Theory or the Universalization of the European Miracle.
Wallerstein (1997, p.1) noted that Europeans in the last centuries have unquestionably sat on top of the world. They have controlled the wealthiest and militarily most powerful countries. They have enjoyed the most advanced technology and were the primary creators of this same technology. Europeans have launched the Industrial Revolution and have sustained growth. They have introduced modernity, capitalism, bureaucratization, and individual liberty.
Whatever happened in Europe in the 16 to 19 centuries represents a pattern that is applicable everywhere, either because it is a progressive achievement of mankind that is irreversible or because it represents the fulfillment of humanity’s basic needs via the removal of artificial obstacles to this realization. Indeed, the European Miracle is not only good but should also be the face of the future everywhere. The Europeans, in gratitude, must make it their destiny to take modern progress to the rest of the world for its benefits, just as it had earlier taken Christianity to the world for its salvation.
The third characteristic of Modernization Paradigm, the positivist reduction of the study of development to measuring and comparing indices of economic growth, finds expression in the focus on GNP and/or GDP as a measure/s of growth.
GDP is calculated as the value of the total final output of all goods and services produced in a single year within a country’s boundaries. GNP is GDP plus incomes received by residents from abroad minus incomes claimed by non-residents. With the focus on GNP and/or GDP, Modernization Paradigm inevitably reduces the meaning of development to economic growth sidelining other aspects of human life that also need to be developed or at least maintained in their current state.
The Leading Critiques of Modernization Paradigm
Each characteristic of Modernization Paradigm has earned critiques from various camps. Leading critiques on each characteristic are presented below.
A. Critiques On The First Characteristic
There are four critiques on the first characteristic of Modernization Paradigm. They are all presented in Box 1.
The Linear Model is ahistorical. The model ignores the effects of history as it suggests that today’s underdeveloped places have no history of development. The case of Argentina is instructive:
Apparently, the case of Argentina, like many other Latin American and African countries in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrated that development progress is not irreversible and that seemingly sustained growth can come to an end. In fact, in the cross-country studies of development conducted by Chenery and Chenery and Syrquin, it was found out that the best fit is nonlinear in logs (Adelman, 2001).
In analyzing development stage of a country, therefore, one cannot ignore history. The development of underdevelopment dilemma. This critique argues against the unilinear view of history and development. Rostow presents a diffusionist view of development suggesting that development is a process whereby capital and resources move from one place to another. Development diffuses from modern, developed areas to traditional, undeveloped areas.
But the world is replete with stories where instead of development being caused to a particular place, underdevelopment is caused instead. The neocolonial dependence theorists have an explanation why this is so. They argue that underdevelopment of the Third World is caused by the existence and exploitative policies of the industrial capitalist countries and their extensions in the form of small but powerful elite of comprador groups in the less developed countries. This explanation is saying that underdevelopment is, therefore, an externally induced phenomenon, opposed to Rostow’s claims that it is caused of internal constraints.
Muhi, et. al. (1993) [1] referred to Andre Frank (1979) to have theorized that the contemporary underdevelopment of Latin American countries is largely part of the historical product of the continuing economic, political, and cultural relations between the underdeveloped countries which he called the satellites and the more developed country as metropole center. Thus, this metropole-satellite or dominant-dependent relationship is an essential outcome of the expansion of capitalist system over the past centuries. Out of this theory, Frank formulated some hypotheses; namely:
The preceding hypotheses of Frank could explain the underdevelopment experienced by some countries today.
The ecological limits of high mass consumption as a universal condition. The Linear Model provides a goal for all countries to emulate, namely the levels of resource consumption seen in the western countries and in Japan. This is a questionable goal, when considering the ecological footprints of modern Westerners vis-à-vis the available ecologically productive land. As presented in Chapter 2, for a total population of only 5.8 billion, the fair earthshare per capita is only 1.5 hectares; but the current ecological footprint of an average modern Westerner is 4.2 hectares. Clearly, there are simply not enough resources in the finite Earth to support what Rostow said would be inevitable situation.
When the book Limits to Growth was published in 1972, it generated huge response and sold a total of 10 million copies. It caused controversies, attacks as well as praises because for the first time, it occurred to humans that there were, indeed, limits to growth. The book’s main contribution was that it focused peoples’ attention on the painful fact that the earth is a finite planet that cannot sustain continuous, expanding demands on its resources. This is precisely the reason why numerous people can no longer enjoy the present affluent standards of living enjoyed by many Northern middle-class people and even by the elite in the southern countries.
Sean McDonagh (1995, p. 39) has good explanation when he argued that in reality, the present demands that humans make on the Earth are already breaching some important limits in the biosphere, that any substantial increase in these demands will exceed the capacity of the larger ecosystems to regenerate themselves, and that continuously spiraling demand is simply not possible on a finite planet (see Box 2).
The discursive construction of the self and the other. This critique attacks Rostow’s model as hierarchical as it suggests that countries can move from a lower or worse stage to a higher or better stage.
There is then a rank ordering of places and peoples in this model in which places in the higher stages of growth are better and peoples therein are more ‘civilized’, ‘tamed’ than those places and peoples in the lower stages of growth who are “uncivilized”, “barbaric”. But this is not always the case, as certainly there are peoples in places in the lower stages of growth who are more ‘humane’, ‘civilized’, ‘honest’, ‘truthful’, ‘reliable’, ‘kind’, ‘charitable’, ‘sympathetic’, and ‘tolerant’ than those in places in the higher stages of growth. John Huddleston (1998) was even saying something better about the traditional society:
Huddleston went on to describe the second main stage in human development, the emergence of pastoral and crop-growing communities around 10,000 BC. Societies around that time tended to be more secure materially than the more primitive hunter and gatherer communities, allowing greater opportunity to individuals, though this positive development must have been tempered for many by agrowing distinction between the rich and the poor.
From these early societies gradually evolved large permanent settlements or cities, with complex structure of labor divisions, an accumulation of wealth, and eventually the written word which Huddleston referred to as civilization the third main stage in human development. Huddleston pointed out that there is a good case of arguing that these societies were associated with an intensification of armed conflict, greater extremes of wealth and poverty, autocratic government, slavery, and a lower status for women than in rural societies.
Simon Ramo (1983, pp. 2-3) provided the description of the twentieth century modern world: it is suffering from a fatal imbalance between accelerating technological advance and lagging social progress. The significance of this imbalance prompted Ramo to label the twentieth century as the “century of mismatch,” a period in time overwhelmed by the consequences of the race’s failure to match technological strides with social advance. Thus, the utter barbarism in a much higher passion and much broader impact are unleashed by supposedly ‘civilized’ individuals.
Where is ‘civility’, ‘compassion’, and the like in the developed world if modern, civilized people choose to use $45 million to buy two fighter aircrafts instead of using the same amount to install 300,000 hand pumps in “Third World” villages to give access to safe drinking water? When for $1.4 billion they choose to buy one Trident submarine instead of using the same amount to inaugurate a five-year program for universal child immunization against six deadly diseases, thus preventing a million deaths a year? When for $12 million they choose to do nuclear weapons test instead of using the same amount to train 40,000 community health workers in the “Third World”? When for $300 billion, the United States choose to finance its military instead of creating 600 million jobs worldwide? (Fox, 1991, pp. 80-81).
Indeed, the discursive construction of the self and the other is illusory at best. Box 3 presents the paradoxes of the modern times.
B. Critiques On The Second Characteristic
There are three critiques aimed at the second characteristic of Modernization Paradigm. These are presented in Box 4.
The particular situation in a particular time and space does not seem to fit the model. In development works with all their nuances, institutions do matter. The World Bank (2000, p. 1) puts it this way: “Institutions matter; sustained development should be rooted in processes that are socially inclusive and responsive to changing circumstances.”
Todaro observed that when interest in the poor nations of the world really began to materialize following the Second World War, economists in the industrialized nations were caught off guard. They had no readily available conceptual apparatus with which to analyze the process of economic growth in largely agrarian societies characterized by the virtual absence of modern economic structures. But they did have the recent experience of the:
But Marshall Plan, according to Todaro, worked for Europe because the European countries receiving aid possessed the necessary structural, institutional and attitudinal conditions (e.g. well-integrated commodity and money markets, highly developed transport facilities, a well-trained and educated workforce, the motivation to succeed, an efficient government bureaucracy) to convert new capital effectively into higher levels of output. Universalizing Theory assumes the existence of same attitudes and arrangements in underdeveloped nations. Yet in many cases they are inadequate or totally absent, as are complementary factors such as managerial competence, skilled labor, and the ability to plan and administer a wide assortment of development projects.
Perhaps, the most grievous mistake Universalizing Theory commits is its failure to account the fact that today, poor countries have been subjected to a highly integrated and complex international system that favors the already developed, that developing countries are subjected to the whims and caprices of the developed ones. Simply put, today’s developed countries underwent development without the interference/dictates of superior countries and they had at their disposal cheap resources and labor from the poor countries. At present, developing nations are virtually under the control/dictates of the developed ones.
Adelman (2001, pp. 126-127) conducted and reviewed studies on development histories of several countries. Various conclusions were drawn, among which is that initial conditions of countries do shape subsequent development; thereby putting more to doubt the second characteristic of Modernization Paradigm. The following facts were found out:
Universalizing Theory is intrinsically impossible. Eurocentrism is a certain belief held by certain group of people, now peddled as truth that is valid across all time and space. This is an impossibly absurd idea. The Kluckhohn Model is instructive in this regard.
The Kluckhohn Model, popular in the field of Anthropology, was developed by two scientists from Harvard University, Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, in 1961 after a ten-year study of five distinctive communities in the American Southwest called the Rimrock Area. The Rimrock Area:
Posted in the Internet, Tom Gallagher (2001) of the Oregon State University had his article titled The Value Orientation Method: A Tool To Help Understand Cultural Differences. Accordingly, the Five Common Human Concerns and Three Possible Responses were drawn, as shown in Table 1.
After knowing the five value orientations and the three possible responses for each, the task now is to know what value orientations are held by Eurocentrism and those held by other cultures.
Gallagher wrote that most studies of the dominant Euro-American culture in the United States found out that it is future-oriented, focused on doing, emphasizes individualism, aspires to be dominant over nature, and believes that human nature is mixed, some people are good and some are bad.
By contrast, most studies show that native cultures are past-oriented, focused on being, emphasize collateral (group) relations, aspire to be in harmony with nature, and believe that people are fundamentally good (see Table 2).
Eurocentrism, therefore, is only one of numerous possible responses on various human concerns. But it does not want to consider the value orientations held by other cultures to be valid; even as it peddles the value orientations it holds to be the only reality. This is an impossible task to begin with, that no matter how well meaning the efforts are, they would not be attained without causing ethnocide and even genocide in the process.
Universalizing Theory is not in fact universal, but rather a presentation of the western historical pattern as though it were universal. The third critique is closely related to the second. Of the three possible responses for each of the five value orientations, Eurocentrism represents only one possible response. To peddle the same held value orientation as the only reality is not in fact getting universal, but rather a presentation of the same held value orientations as though it were universal.
The result of IDRC study cited in a previous Chapter has a description for this: it is blatantly false (see also Box 5).
C. Critique On The Third Characteristic
Measuring level of development by means of GDP/GNP is not appropriate, if not totally absurd. It was pointed out that if one destroys a forest, it:
Indeed, even if GNP and GDP reflect the average incomes in a country, GNP and GDP per capita have numerous limitations when it comes to measuring people’s actual well-being. They do not show how equitably a country’s income is distributed. They do not account for pollution, environmental degradation and resource depletion. They do not register unpaid work done within the family and community, or work done in the shadow economy. And they attach equal importance to “goods” (such as medicines) and “bads” (such as cigarettes and chemical weapons) while ignoring the value of leisure and human freedom.
Also, by focusing on GNP/GDP, it becomes inevitable that economic growth is favored over other aspects of human life. While economic growth is important because it enhances the country’s potential for reducing poverty and solving other problems; history offers numerous examples where economic growth was not followed by similar progress in human development. Instead, growth was achieved at the cost of greater inequity, higher unemployment, weakened democracy, loss of cultural identity, or overconsumption of resources needed by future generations.
Over time, as the link between economic growth and social and environmental issues are better understood, experts including economists tend to agree that this kind of growth is inevitably unsustainable that is, it cannot continue along the same line for long (see also Box 6).
It is heartening to note that on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, September 15, 2009 the official start of 2008 global recession, French President Sarkozy gave a speech calling for change in how countries measure wealth. He suggested the need for a new metric, other than GNP/GDP, that would take into account the happiness of a country’s population along with its economic prosperity. When this was noticed at all in the U.S. media, there were the typical sneers and remarks about baguettes, long lunches, and jealousy of American productivity. But there is more than one way of measuring a country’s success, and GNP/GDP is certainly very seriously flawed as a measure of progress.
The observed characteristics of Modernization Paradigm discussed above conspire to cause the economic disorder, environmental decay, and dehumanization presented in Chapter 2.
Presented below were the references in writing the book that was published in 2009 by the Mindanao Center for Policy Studies, with Dr. Sophremiano B. Antipolo as Center Director….
