On Development

Rachel gave me a copy of Dreams from My Father recently - good timing as I'd been putting off buying it myself until after the election, for fear of liking it too much (given the prospect, however unlikely, that Obama might lose). I finished it a few days ago and found that I was just as impressed by it as I suspected I might be.

As anyone who's read it knows, it's a book about a lot of things, including identity, family, and community. It's also, in some respects, about development. One thing I found particularly interesting was how Obama made connections among his childhood experiences in Indonesia, his visit to Kenya, and his work in Chicago. I was struck, for example, by this passage, ruminating on how the breakdown of the local retail economy affected the poor Chicago community of Altgeld Gardens:

Now...I saw those Djarkarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than the folks out in Altgeld.... And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.

It was the absense of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.... For how long could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?

Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Back, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair.

There are a lot of things at work here. Obama certainly isn't the only person to have made observations along these lines, but it's noteworthy that the next US president will be someone who not only has first-hand experience of living in the developing world, but is willing to problematize the notion of "development" in such a way that is mindful of the effect of economic globalization and change on those left behind.

I've also been reading Amartya Sen's "Development as Freedom," which is a magnificent work aimed in large part at redefining our notion of development in a way that bases the notion not primarily on economic indicators like GDP, but on how the capacity of individual people to achieve their desired goals in life is enhanced or degraded. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Sen's work has had quite the influence it deserves in the decade since the book was written, but if his arguments are to be expressed in policy - and I think that, ultimately, they will be - it will require leaders with the capacity to grasp them instinctually. Reading the passage above from Dreams gave me a little more hope on that account.

The passage also points out that there is a logic to the way that communities develop and function, and that disruption of those communities in the name of progress can leave people poorer in ways that outsiders might not anticipate or even find credible. It's an interesting lesson in light of some of what I've been reading about urban issues in India, but that's for another post.