| A series of lectures given by Howard Richards at the University of Baroda, Gujarat State, India, in August and September of 1995 | Every culture in the world, at the present moment, is enmeshed in the global economy. That economy, typically and paradigmatically, mobilizes resources to meet needs, but only through exchanges for money. Karl Marx, in the second volume of Capital, written in the late 19th century, showed the role of money somewhat like this:
The diagram shows that the production process begins and ends with money. At the beginning money is invested in the purchase of the means of production. The means of production (including labour power) are thrown into the production process, which results in the production of commodities, which are sold. At the end money reappears as revenue from sales. Needs are met because the commodities bought are consumed, but some needs go unmet either because nobody invested the money to produce the required goods and services, or because the persons who need the goods and services lack the money to buy them. Now, in 1995, humanity has experience with many methods for overcoming the limitations of this basic economic paradigm, and on the whole our species is doing a better job of mobilizing resources to meet needs than was done in the preceding century. We can do even better, and we can do better with less damage to the environment. To continue doing better we need to continue to work to overcome the inherent structural limitations of a system whose mainspring is the investment of money for the purpose of making more money. Associated with this simple but fundamental model of money augmenting itself (in other words, of the accumulation of capital), is the idea of competition of capitals. Normally and typically, the profits of production will be thrown back into production, in order to achieve economies of scale, and in order to make technical improvements in the production process; or, perhaps, to enter into a new and promising line of business. Some sort of reinvestment of capital to increase the capacity of capital to augment itself must be done, because capitals compete with each other. The enterprise that does not use its wealth to make more wealth erodes its competitive position; for example, it fails to keep abreast of the new technology that represents the state of the art in its field. It will be at a disadvantage with respect to its competitors, and will in all likelihood sooner or later cease to exist. Capitals compete, and must compete. A consequence for education of the competition of capitals is that Gandhi's idea, that the rich should declare themselves trustees for the poor and use their wealth for service rather than for personal gain, is of limited application. Educating the rich and the talented to have a sense of social responsibility - to think of themselves as trustees for the benefit of others, as Gandhi put it - will not relieve them of the need to manage their enterprises in a way that will keep the enterprises competitive. The discipline competition imposes on business is in many ways a good thing; it comes up against its inherent limitations at the point where meeting human needs conflicts with what must be done to save the firm from bankruptcy. The competition of capitals will normally require, among other things, not paying wages higher than the wages competitors are paying. It often requires paying wages lower than competitors pay, for example in situations where the competitors have some other advantage, say better technology, and the firm succeeds in producing a competitive product at a competitive price only by keeping its labor costs down. Constructive development aims to meet more needs more completely and more effectively than can be done using economic incentives alone. Constructive education will bring out the power of those other incentives. In order to judge whether we are succeeding in taking constructive steps, as opposed to merely talking about a better world in the abstract, we need ways to evaluate our daily work. Whether there are inherent defects in the biological raw material that culture has to work with, such that nothing can be done to construct a culture appreciably better than those that already exist, is an open question. I will discuss that question in my fourth lecture. For now I will assume that cultural action can restructure culture for the better, and I will suggest ways to evaluate whether that is in fact happening. We humans are culture-creating animals. We are able to create social norms that will overcome the limitations of our basic structure, and eventually to transform the basic structure. Our capacity for recreating social relationships is evident in our ability to make new friends, or start new clubs and draft their rules and by-laws, or start cooperatives and other forms of non-standard business enterprises; we can remold households and the roles of persons in the households; we can pass new laws; we can even compose and ratify a United Nations Charter and develop a new body of international law. However, this sanguine assessment of the social creativity of our species must be balanced by an appreciation of the homeostatic defenses of our institutions. Institutions that persist are somewhat like living systems that have multiple ways of reverting to their normal state when altered; they resist change; they commonly have mechanisms built into their very structures that systematically resist change. Attempts to change the structure of the global economy possesses such homeostatic defenses. That is to say, attempts to change it commonly backfire, and the system tends to reassert itself as it was before. Because of the basic structure's homeostatic defenses constructive development must pursue paths that are not easy and not obvious. There is no easy or obvious way to restructure the global economy. One reason why it is not easy for cultural action through education to improve social structure stems from the considerations I presented at the beginning of this lecture, from our reliance on production for money to mobilize resources to meet needs, from the competition of capitals; and also from a third, related, consideration I have not mentioned yet, which is the mobility of capital, its ability to move around the globe seeking ways to maximize returns on investments. It can be - and often has been -argued that the mainspring of production of the necessities of life is the accumulation of capital, and that the necessities will either be produced under conditions favorable for the accumulation of capital or they will not produced at all. You have already heard a great deal about this self-protective feature of the economy's basic structure from the right, from the left, and from cynics. From the right you have heard that it is necessary to keep wages and taxes down in order for national industry to be competitive in the international market; that the transfer of wealth from rich to poor by taxation causes capital to flee and new investors to shy away; that business is already overburdened with safety and environmental regulations and more burdens on business can only cost jobs and raise prices; compulsory insurance against work accidents, restrictions on firing employees at will, and a host of other amenities weaken incentives for investors and therefor lead to economic stagnation. From the left you have already heard that - for the same reasons given by the right - the system cannot be satisfactorily reformed, and must therefore be replaced. From the cynics you have heard that the system cannot be satisfactorily reformed, and cannot be replaced either, and that attempts to replace it with something better necessarily lead to chaos and tyranny. Constructive development offers an alternative that is in principle viable. It relies on cultural action to strengthen the motives that supplement economic incentives with other incentives. Thus it restructures the social reality which imposes cultural restraints on reform. Yes, the profit motive can be limited and restrained - but only if we do not depend on it as much as we do. Yes, part of the social surplus (i.e. part of revenues) can be captured by the public and nonprofit sectors, and directed by them toward socially desirable purposes - but only if human minds and hearts are sufficiently committed to making social priorities work. Transformative cultural action projects, at the grassroots (and among elites at high levels too) with their direct and pragmatic approaches to mobilizing resources to meet needs, can make a structural difference. Through the educational processes of cultural action norms can be created which will correct the tendency of the mainspring of the basic structure to leave human needs unmet whenever it is in any way challenged. The evaluation of a project is concerned with assessing whether the project is true to its ideals and is accomplishing its objectives; in a large sense it is concerned, as Michael Scriven says, with the project's "worth." Is it worth doing, and, among all the things that might be done, is it among those that are most worth doing ? I will now suggest several criteria for evaluating projects with a view to their worth as contributions to structural transformation. One criterion for the evaluation of a constructive development project is whether the evaluation process itself serves the constructive and transformative purposes of the project. A constructive project will seek to create the culture of a viable tomorrow by empowering people, by finding and tapping reserves of positive energy, by strengthening norms of cooperation and sharing, and by weakening norms that allow exploitation. When it comes time to do a summative evaluation, then the evaluation process itself should not set the project back, but should move it forward. It should not compel the project participants to down tools and suddenly begin to function in a new conceptual framework in order to adjust to the research design of the evaluator. Instead, the evaluation itself should empower the participants. It should tap their vital energies. It should be an example of successful cooperation. It should avoid any kind of exploitation, and in particular it should avoid treating the participants merely as sources of data, which the specialist will then use to write a report for higher authorities or for an academic journal. In connection with this first criterion, that the evaluation process itself should contribute to building the culture of a better future, I would like to recommend a set of tools and assessment procedures for the evaluation of reforestation projects prepared by the community forestry unit of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO. The FAO has produced a set of guides for assessment, monitoring, and evaluation, for the use of communities who mobilize to plant trees and in other ways to improve forests. The methods include group meetings, making drawings and discussing them, local case studies, semi-structured interviews, ordinal ranking, use of farming records, accounts, village theatre, tape recordings, and participatory video. Although the FAO materials are prepared with forestry in mind, and were developed largely in Africa, they can easily be adapted for use in other places, and for projects that organize around health, child care, land, employment, food production, veterinary medicine, housing, crime prevention, cooperative buying or marketing, domestic abuse, drugs and alcohol, healthy recreation for adolescents, pre-schools, literacy, or other areas of concern. (They can be obtained from Marilyn Hoskins at FAO headquarters in Rome.) An outsider who participates in the life of a project, following this first criterion for constructive evaluation, will find - sometimes to her or his dismay - that the meaning of "participation" is ambiguous. One meaning of "participation" implies acting like a member of the community where the project is, seeking to understand its symbols, seeking to encourage its vital energies, following its norms and practices. But the community norms may not lend themselves to constructing tomorrow's culture. The villagers may meet an outside evaluator with a band, a military salute, and a display of flags. The community may be sharply divided, and it may be an unwritten rule that some people's opinions do not count. Meetings may begin or end with the excessive consumption of mind-numbing beverages. Women may be forbidden by their husbands to come to meetings, or to leave home at all for any reason. It is necessary to make difficult choices - balancing the danger of making a premature, uninvited and ill-advised judgment about how to improve a community's norms by teaching it what "participation" really means; against the danger of contributing to practices that are part of the problem more than they are part of the solution. Another consequence of adopting an evaluation method which encourages the same participatory values that a constructive development project itself encourages, is that conflicts will come out into the open. Conflicts must be recognized, and somehow dealt with. As a rule the words spoken by participants in interviews and group discussions cannot be meaningfully interpreted without knowing who is in conflict with whom about what. Faced with a project torn apart by conflicts, as so many are, a researcher may yearn for the old-fashioned academic comfort of the social scientist who sought data so "objective" and abstract that messy items like conflicts among people remained submerged and never surfaced, and who entered the community so allied with higher authority that the participants would be sure to say only what they thought the researcher wanted to hear. But there is consolation in finding out that the evaluation process has succeeded in delving far enough beneath the surface to detect and deal with the real problems that impede the growth of a culture of solidarity. A second criterion for constructive evaluation is that the evaluation should determine whether and to what extent the project is empowering. "Empowerment" is an important and controversial word; I will use the term in a positive and constructive sense, without taking time to discuss the ways in which, in my opinion, the word "empowerment" is often misunderstood and misused. To speak of "empowerment," using the term as I propose to use it, provides another way of expressing what I have already said about constructive development. I will speak of "empowerment" as a way of coping with "insecurity." To say that most people today experience "insecurity" is another way of referring to the fact that humanity is far less than fully successful in mobilizing resources to meet needs. To define "empowerment," I use the definition of "power" given by Hannah Arendt after a review of the literature on the subject. Power is the ability to act in concert. Nobody has power alone. A group, and consequently each of its members, is empowered when they achieve sufficient cohesion to provide mutual support for each other, and to work together to solve common problems. Empowerment is indispensable at this point in history for anybody who is threatened with violence, or whose access to the necessities of life is uncertain. Therefore it is indispensable for almost everyone. Although for most people human life has never been secure, it is now threatened with violence and poverty in ways characteristic of modernity, and in ways which for most people in most of the world have been accentuated by the growing flexibility of business practices which has marked the last several decades. This flexibility includes greater reliance on part time and temporary personnel, who usually lack pension and health care benefits. It also includes greater movement of operations from one country to another in search of more favorable business conditions, the accelerated adoption of labor-saving technologies, and the downsizing of professional and managerial staffs. In some countries the civil service, the schools, and the public health services have also downsized staff and/or abolished tenure. For most people today access to the necessities of life depends on selling our services as workers or professionals of some kind, and it is a general structural fact of economic society that there is no guarantee that the services we have to sell will find buyers. Exacerbating this inherent feature of the structure of the economy, is the worldwide tendency in the last three decades for profit-seeking to throw off some of the shackles that had been imposed on it by the social policies of the four decades before the previous three. Greater freedom for business spells invigoration for the corporate bottom line, but it spells insecurity for most people. There is increasing insecurity among middle class people who previously felt secure, while those who have been marginal for generations remain marginal. Most governments are heavily in debt, and reluctant to raise taxes at a time when it is widely believed that taxes are already too high. In addition, most governments are under the influence of ideologies which advocate lower taxes and fewer government programs. Where will the people in need turn ? It seems inevitable that they (i.e. we) will turn to forms of self-help, including help through two institutions older than capitalism, and older than the nation-state: the family and the church. It would follow that these ancient institutions should be improved, strengthened, and supplemented. It seems inevitable too that to the extent that no healthy and constructive remedies are found for the insecurity that most people face; many people will continue to seek security and to vent frustrations in criminal gangs, fanatic cults, para-militaries, and pathological forms of collectivism based on race or ethnicity. Others will seek private and purely subjective surcease of pain through alcohol, hallucinations, drugs, and walking the streets talking to themselves. Empowerment of communities to solve their problems is a necessity in a world where for structural reasons many needs are not fulfilled by either the private or the public sector. Unfortunately, many social projects and programs make little or no effort to achieve empowerment. For the same unfortunate reason, evaluation of projects according to the empowerment criterion for evaluation is often not difficult, because the project neither intends empowerment nor achieves it. For example, pediatric studies showed that the majority of children in a province I shall not name in a country I shall not name, suffered from at least some degree of Vitamin A deficiency. A university I shall not name, under a grant from U.S.A.I.D, which I shall name, created a method for inserting Vitamin A in sugar, which was then inserted in foods that the children commonly ate. The program was evaluated as a success in the respect that Vitamin A deficiencies among children in the province declined. Although the program was announced and was not a secret, I do not believe that the children or their parents were aware that the problem had been solved, nor made aware that there had been a problem. I argued that educational programs should have been used to pose the problem to the people concerned, and to encourage the consumption of red and yellow vegetables, which were neither rare nor expensive in the province. I was told that education would not be cost/effective. But to speak of cost/effectiveness begs the question. By definition it refers to achieving the objective at lower cost than by the available alternative methods, or to achieving the objective to a higher degree at the same cost. Unless the objective is defined, cost/effectiveness is a meaningless concept. I was arguing that the empowerment of the people should have been the main objective. The incident of the Vitamin A in the sugar shows a mistaken philosophy of history. The mistaken philosophy conceives of social science and allied sciences such as medicine as identifying the people's needs so that programs funded by governments or by foundations can meet those needs. The reason why this philosophy is mistaken is that the basic structure of the global economy is such that meeting human needs through a combination of a global welfare state (or a series of welfare states covering the globe) and private philanthropy is not possible. The reason why it is not possible is that, on the whole and in general, nations and individuals which transferred enough wealth from rich to poor to meet basic human needs (by taxation or by giving) cannot remain competitive. Or, otherwise put, international economic competition is such that not every nation can be a winner, able to fill its private and public coffers to the point where it can afford to guarantee the economic security of its citizens. The wiser philosophy of history that the people who put the Vitamin A in the sugar did not have would see the role of social science not just as that of advisor to so-called "policy-makers" - given that the freedom of action of "policy-makers" is severely limited by the existing economic realities - but rather to a large extent as assisting people at the grassroots to empower themselves, both in order to be able to support each other with the resources they have and in order to be able to take control of more resources. The evaluation of empowerment is also not difficult where there is a nominal commitment to it which remains at the level of what the French, and sometimes also the English, refer to eloquently as "bla bla." This happens when a funding agency that believes in empowerment supports a project on the strength of a proposal that has all the right words in it, and an interview with a project director who says all the right things, but in fact the project does not use a problem-posing methodology suitable for bringing empowerment about. Sometimes evidence that empowerment has remained a dead letter is easily gathered because the people who are supposed to have been participating in the project are not able to participate in evaluating it. In such a case the first criterion, that the evaluation advance the values of a viable future culture, becomes relevant to the second. If the participants readily participate in evaluating what they have been doing, and even more so if they take charge of the evaluation process and make it their own, then their response is a good sign that they are able to do something in concert. They are showing their capacity to act in concert by doing something in concert; namely, the evaluation. Perhaps they already had this capacity before the project began, but at least the project did not stifle it. The converse may not be true. People may be good at cooperating among themselves, but inhibited by strangers. They may have learned from experience not to trust strangers. Or it may be that when the project began there was so much apathy, isolation, fear and mistrust; and so little sharing of common understandings, that even being able to meet together in the same room constitutes some degree of empowerment, compared to what went before. The verification of the extent to which empowerment has actually happened requires a more elaborate research methodology when empowerment appears to have been achieved to some considerable degree. I suggest a method that begins from the word "act" included in Arendt's definition of power as the capacity to act in concert. A human act, as is elaborated in what is known in philosophy as action theory, is activity guided by meaning. Aristotle in a classic text speaks of acts as energeia kata logon, which I like to translate as "energy governed by words." We should not, however, define acts in terms of words alone; it would be better to describe acts as ritualized or dramatic human behavior, and to consider speech acts to be one large subclass of human acts in general. Thus we can recognize that meaning can be given to a bit of human behavior, thus qualifying it to be counted as an act, not only by words, but also, for examples, by a nod of the head, a wave of the hand, a dance step, the putting of a ring on a finger, or a kiss. That behavior be meaningful is a prerequisite to empowerment, that is to say, to the acquisition of the ability to act in concert. The empowerment process begins with coordinating perceptions and understanding each other. In order to determine whether a project has encouraged and helped people to share meanings which will facilitate united action it is necessary to borrow methods from cultural anthropology. For example, one can conduct what are called "native language interviews." The name "native language interview" derives from the problems anthropologists faced when they set out to study peoples whose languages were not known, whose languages in some cases had no written form and no formal grammar, and where among the people being studied there was nobody who knew English, Hindi, or some other known language, who could serve as a translator. In such a case one might get a pretty good idea of what one word might mean by gesturing and pointing. Then one could perhaps learn a second word by building on the first with more gesturing and pointing. Thus one could gradually develop a conversation without ever using English or Hindi, building up shared meanings by operating entirely within the terms supplied by the informants. The so-called "native language interview," that we use in evaluation and in planning might actually be conducted in English or in Hindi, and not in any exotic language. The point of it, and the reason for calling it by analogy a "native language interview" is that the interviewer studiously avoids contributing anything to the conversation. Whatever the informant says you ask for clarification of. Thus you are led from one idea to another in the mind of the person you are talking to, while taking great pains to bring in nothing from the contents of your own mind. Other methods, in which the interviewer participates more naturally in the conversation, also seek to achieve the aim of the native language interview, which is to learn to perceive the world from the informant's point of view. This aim can also be achieved with no interviewer, but instead someone whose role is that of a facilitator, or with no interviewer and no facilitator either, but rather a meeting of project participants, of which some sort of record is made. Once it is established, by somehow entering into the way the participants understand the world, themselves, and their project, that the group has been able to establish communication, to coordinate perceptions, to share understandings, and to draw conclusions together about what to do, the next step is to find out what actions the group has actually carried out. We demonstrate that the group is empowered by showing what they have done. In this connection it is important to track what I call "non-objectives," i.e. objectives the people have defined and pursued for themselves, which were not included in the initial program plan. This is not to say that the initial plan for the program were hostile to the people becoming capable of deliberating and acting and taking the initiative to solve their problems in new ways not originally contemplated. Rather we would say that the initial plan for the program included what might be called a second-level objective. It proposed, for example, "the empowerment of the people in the neighborhood." This second-level objective implies that the people in the neighborhood would achieve some non-objectives; they would initiate something. I do not want to be understood as saying that empowerment is always best achieved when outsiders stay out and leave the local people to run their own project in their own way. It often happens that an outsider can be a catalyst for participation just because the outsider stands for the universal norm that everybody has a right to participate. For example, a woman from Brazil was instrumental in facilitating the construction of a community museum by indigenous people in southern Ecuador. The museum served to attract tourists and generate income from handicraft sales, and also to build pride in their heritage. The presence of a foreigner helped the local people to forget old quarrels that divided the community, and it encouraged people who might otherwise have been intimidated to make contributions to the common project. The energy and sensitivity of the particular person in question, plus the fact that she was a foreigner with no personal stake or status in the community, helped make the project more truly the people's own than it would have been without her. Let me now give an example of an evaluation that assessed the level of empowerment by understanding the project from the participants' point of view, and by recording the concerted actions that the participants carried out. The evaluation of a project whose participants were mostly peasant women in a coastal region of southern Chile began with an outside evaluator listening to selected samples of the women, and to a sample of the few men who participated, both singly and in groups. From the "native language" words the people spoke a "verbal image" was composed. The verbal image was their account of what they were doing and why they were doing it. This verbal image was then read and discussed in each of 43 local centers, by the local participants, with no outsiders present. In this way each of several thousand participants had an opportunity to make corrections and additions to the report. One might ask whether making a "native language" verbal image and validating it among all participants could be done if instead of several thousand participants there were several hundred thousand, or several million. The answer is: yes, it could be, and it would also be possible to take a random sample of a project with many millions of participants (such as the Integrated Child Development Services program in India, ICDS), and compose a verbal image grounded in listening to a sample of the sample. The ICDS was recently evaluated on the basis of a sample of 700 anganwadis (child care centers); with this size sample it would have been feasible to assess the degree of empowerment of parents and community groups achieved, through the use of a method like the verbal image. In the project of the peasant women in Chile, the verbal image as corrected expressed a consensus of the participants. It served as the script for an audio-visual presentation which presented the evaluation of the project with music (composed and performed by participants) in a form accessible even to those who could not read. The verbal image also served as a guide for "triangulation," that is to say, for using a variety of methods to check the accuracy of what was asserted in the verbal image. Achievement tests, psychological tests, blind comparisons with controls, data from official records, and other typical social science research methods were used to "triangulate" what the verbal image said; on the whole the results if this double-checking confirmed what the peasants had said in their own words. Thus it was possible to count how many people were involved, and how many of which actions were performed, and to link the actions performed with the consciousness that generated the actions. Some numerical answers could be given to questions about empowerment; it was possible to make visible and transparent what had actually happened, and to verify its magnitude. In the third lecture I will say more about empowerment. Now I wish to add a third criterion for the evaluation of constructive development. The evaluation should measure the post-economic component of the project's achievements. Put somewhat differently, it should report on the project's contribution to what in Spanish called la cultura de la solidaridad, the culture of solidarity. First I will give a brief definition, and then an extensive example accompanied by theoretical discussion. The definition: the posteconomic component of a project is the desirable behavior it elicits which is not motivated by economic incentives. It is convenient to define behavior motivated by economic incentives narrowly: as work for wages or business for profit. As an example, I wish to refer to projects funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, a Dutch organization devoted to improving the lives of the world's children. The foundation's funds come from its ownership of the Van Leer container business. Van Leer is post-economic, in the first place, because the Van Leer family has chosen to devote funds to child welfare instead of re-investing them in the container business or some other business in order to generate still more profits. The projects of the Van Leer foundation are post-economic, in the second place, because they seek to elicit voluntary cooperation from the parents of the children they serve, and from community members, in order to multiply the effect of the small sums of money the foundation can provide. But - wait a minute! - according to the simple economic theory I presented at the beginning of this lecture, it ought to be impossible for the Van Leer container company to keep giving millions of guilders to the world's children year after year. The competition of capitals should prevent it. There must be somewhere in the world some other container manufacturer, more ruthless than Van Leer and less charitable, which is gaining a competitive advantage over Van Leer because it uses its profits to compete in business instead of giving them away. The massive charity of the Van Leer family - small as it is compared to the needs of the world's children - must be at the expense of their personal consumption, since it cannot be entirely at the expense of what is needed to stay competitive. Their actions are praiseworthy precisely because they are unusual and conducted at some risk to themselves. There may also be some special reason why the Van Leers are able to follow conscience more than economic necessity. We know, for example, that there was a special reason why Mahatma Gandhi could persuade the textile mill owners of Ahmedabad to give the textile workers a 35% wage increase in 1918; the textile mill owners could follow conscience because during World War I India was sheltered from competition from European textile mills, and the mill owners were making exceptionally large profits. There may be a special reason why Van Leer can afford its immense generosity, but, if so, I do not know what it is. Notice, however, that the difficulty and the rarity of the flow of large sums from business revenues into child welfare is due to the cultural structure of competition. There is no physical reason why goods and services might not be regularly directed to meet children's needs. Human groups have been allocating resources to children for many centuries, long before market institutions took the lead in shaping society, and long before the basic structure was such that the majority's necessities of life are met only when money flows first into investment and then into wages. We can ask the question whether it is in principle possible, under conditions of modern high technology mass production, to organize production in such a way that the products can be mobilized to meet needs, without hindrance by the limitations imposed by the competition of capitals and the need to create favorable conditions for capital accumulation. The answer to the question is yes, it can be done in principle. The principles of the methods of economic planning that can do it were pioneered by the Italian economist Piero Sraffa in his book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. What Sraffa shows is that economics as we know it is not necessary; it is a cultural structure superimposed on the physical structures needed to produce goods and services - but the physical structures could run perfectly well with some other cultural structure. Sraffa's basic model is as follows; for simplicity it supposes an economy which produces only two commodities, wheat and iron. The same principles can be extended to the production of three, four,...n commodities.
The principle thus illustrated can be generalized to plan an economy with many products. It is behind the input-output models used in several countries today, and also behind the world scale input-output model elaborated for the United Nations by a team headed by Wassily Leontiev. Similar ideas are found in other economic theories, such as the "modern economics" espoused by Joan Robinson and her school at Cambridge University. In the analysis of capitalist production by Marx which I gave at the beginning of this lecture there was built into the economic model an assumption that economic motives would motivate the investor. As Marx himself put it, the capitalist advanced money to acquire the means of production only with the "sly intention" of getting back more money than he advanced. Viewed more systematically, the process portrayed by Marx can be viewed as money augmenting itself; the capitalist can be seen simply as the tool of capital, whose inner necessity is to accumulate. Thus society's production of goods and services can be seen as merely the consequence of money's need to grow into more money; somewhat as human life itself can be seen as merely the product of the need of the information in DNA codes to replicate itself. But Sraffa's model includes no such assumptions about the role of money in production. In principle, production could function with no money at all. In principle, no economic motivation is needed. In order to find out what must be done to make production happen it is not economists who need to be consulted, but engineers, agronomists, and other technical experts who know what is needed to make the physical production process work. It then becomes a psychological, cultural, managerial, and educational problem to organize people to do whatever people have to do, in order to be sure the required physical inputs are present at the right times and places. Investing for profit and working for wages can then be seen as only one set of cultural structures, which succeeds - more or less - in organizing humans to do what we have to do, in order to mesh our activities with the physical requirements of production. Early in this century Max Weber argued that modern economic society employing modern technology could only come into existence where there were already cultural structures suitable for operating it and making it work. The Protestant ethic was supposed to be conducive to the birth of the spirit of capitalism, and the spirit of capitalism led to industry based on scientific technology. Today Weber's thesis is untenable. We know that the Japanese, the Chinese in Singapore and Hong Kong, and others, run successful versions of capitalism without a trace of the Protestant ethic. We know that Adolf Hitler was able to galvanize the productive efforts of the German people through a set of emotions different from - although not better than - economic incentives, which included heavy doses of hatred, fear, and patriotism. The Soviet Union no longer exists, but while it existed, it employed modern technology, with a spirit which was - whatever it was - not the Protestant ethic and not the capitalist spirit. Sraffa has shown in principle and history has shown in practice that a post-economic society is possible. Therefore the constraints imposed by economic reality on the generosity of people who want to do good, like the Van Leer family; and the constraints imposed by economic reality on the implementation of Gandhi's idea that those of us who have property and talent should regard ourselves as trustees holding our property and our talent for the benefit of the poor - all these constraints imposed by economic reality are movable constraints. They are products of cultural structures, and they can be moved if we can improve our cultural structures by strengthening post-economic incentives. We can evaluate every social project by measuring its contribution to building a post-economic culture. In evaluation for constructive development, we measure how much progress is being made toward a society capable of mobilizing resources to meet needs through democratic cooperation. This large-scale concern with global cultural transformation coincides with the interest of the Van Leer Foundation in measuring the effectiveness of its grants. The foundation wants to know things like whether mothers are willing to give of their time to staff a cooperative day care program; whether the fathers (or, for that matter, the mothers) are willing to fix the roof of the day care center, and to repair the furniture; it wants to know whether local grocers and farmers will deliver food for lunches; whether volunteers will cook it and wash up afterwards; whether doctors and nurses will do free examinations and vaccinations; whether lawyers will intervene in cases of spousal and child abuse. I will now discuss three practical issues that arise in trying to measure the post-economic component of a project. The first concerns how to present the information. This topic was discussed at a seminar on "evaluating cultural action" which was held in Peru in 1987 with representatives of several funding agencies. The consensus was that it is more important to be candid and to make clear what really happened than to show impressive numerical ratios. For example, it is more meaningful to say that twelve volunteers came, that they worked at total of 112 hours, and that they repainted the building inside and out. It is less meaningful to construct a ratio showing that for every dollar contributed by a funding agency, local people contributed ten dollars worth of time, money, and goods. The problem with abstract ratios - which sometimes must be included, like it or not, because they are required by funding guidelines - is that by summarizing the details they hide them; hence they may be deceptive, and they may give rise to a suspicion of deception even if there is no such intent. The second concerns how to evaluate the contributions of people who work for money, but not just for money. This includes almost everyone. We know from studies like Thomas Peters' In Search of Excellence that the most profit-oriented and profitable business enterprises inspire their employees through a "company culture" that makes the employees enjoy their work and feel that they are part of a team effort. Nonprofit agencies and public institutions rely on having employees who believe in what they are doing; they flounder and fail when they have only wage incentives to motivate their staffs. It might seem feasible to measure the post-economic component by comparing what employees could make somewhere else with what they do make working at an agency whose mission they believe in. But that would be speculative, and it would probably hurt somebody's feelings. It is better to allude only briefly to other employment options the staff might have (or might have had, if they had not let other career opportunities slip away), and to concentrate instead on the positive features that make people committed to their work. An evaluation should try to capture the mystique of the project or program. It should record the sentiments and illuminate the souls of the people in it; like light, it should make its objects visible. Pictures, videos, descriptive phrases, and exact quotations from the project participants and staff should show the social reality as it is lived, and should show why and how the project is a transformative influence acting in the context of the larger culture. A person who reads the evaluation should feel that she or he was there, that she saw what it was, felt how people felt, and that she could walk into the pages of the evaluation and participate in the project like one participant more. Thus the post-economic component of the motivation of the staff's employees can be depicted and assessed by evoking the project's draw and its magnetism. A third issue in measuring the post-economic component is fairness. If people are doing what they are doing because they believe in it, and not because of the pay, that is a post-economic achievement, an example of living by a spiritual ideal. But the better world we are building is not one that maximizes self-sacrifice, so that everybody works for nothing; it is one where people cooperate and help each other on the basis of reciprocity and fairness. It is sometimes difficult to tell where solidarity ends and exploitation begins. This point can be illustrated in terms of the recent experience of the Madres Comunitarias movement in Colombia, in South America. Madres Comunitarias (which might be translated "Mothers Devoted to the Community") started as volunteer groups of poor mothers, who took the lead in cooperative action to improve their neighborhoods. In the course of time many pre-schools and day care centers were started as a response to some of the most pressing felt needs. There came a point when many of the mothers came to perceive that they were being used as a source of cheap labor to save the government the expense of hiring teachers. The Madres Comunitarias problem is not an easy one to solve because the government of Colombia, like most governments, is deeply in debt and reaching the limit of what it can extract from taxpayers. It is probably true that many of the child care institutions could not be run at all without the cheap or volunteer labor provided by the Madres. On the other hand, it must also be true that there is waste in the system somewhere; somewhere somebody is living in undeserved luxury, squandering resources that could in principle be shifted from where they are and put to better use to ease the burdens of the Madres. The free market mechanism would have given a simple answer to the question how much to pay the Madres: your labor is worth whatever somebody with money is willing to pay for it, no less and no more. As we try to improve upon the achievements of economic society, by mobilizing a variety of resources and tapping a variety of motivations for the sake of meeting needs, we are sailing off into uncharted waters. For every economic problem we solve by cooperation, we encounter a difficult problem in human relations. There are other characteristics of a good evaluation, which are important, and although I will not discuss them I do not wish to underestimate them. I will stop with the three criteria I have discussed: that the process of evaluation should itself embody the values of cultural transformation; that a criterion for evaluation should be empowerment; and that a criterion for evaluation should be the project's contribution toward building a post-economic society. I believe that these three evaluative criteria are entailed by a constructive philosophy of development. Notes and ReferencesAristotle speaks of energeia kata logon in Book Two of Nichomachean Ethics (various editions). My reference to Michael Scriven, who is well known in educational evaluation circles, is in gratitude for his recognition that evaluations are about causes of value (or worth), and thus they connect with all the great traditional questions of ethics and epistemology. See, e.g. Michael Scriven, "Maximizing the Power of Causal Investigation: the Modus Operandi Method," in W. J. Popham (ed.) Evaluation in Education. Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan, 1974. The criterion for evaluating whether or not development has been achieved has typically been tied to whether the "developing" country is succeeding in becoming more like a "developed" country. See, e.g. Kahl, Joseph Alan, The Measurement of Modernism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. The road to becoming developed has typically been taken to involve accumulating capital, in the forms of modern infrastructure and productive equipment, including the equipment for a modern capitalist agriculture replacing traditional owner-operated or tenant-operated farms. Karl Marx anticipated the emphasis on accumulation found in 20th century mainstream development thinking, when he wrote at the end of his Critique of the Gotha Program that the development of productive capacity had to come first, and only then, when capital investment had become sufficient to create prosperity for everyone, could society write on its banners, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers, 1938. The identification of development with capital accumulation is shown, for example in a paper by Clive Hamilton where he asks whether eight nations (India, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan) can repeat the "success" of South Korea and Taiwan. His focus is on the question whether political power in those nations is in the hands of a nationalist capitalist class which will enforce policies that will channel resources into capital accumulation, and away from nonproductive use of resources in speculation, usury, corruption, etc. Clive Hamilton, "Can the Rest of Asia Emulate the NICs?" Third World Quarterly (1987), pp. 1225-1256. Consistent with the overall idea that "to develop" means to save and retain earnings, and to invest capital in productive capacity, assessing whether development had happened was typically done with measures of a nation's production, or production per capita. But in recent decades there have been several attempts at replacing what used to be standard measures of the success of a nation's "development" such as Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product per capita, GNP or GDP; with measures more oriented toward knowing whether people's needs are met, such as the Physical Quality of Life Index, PQLI; the Human Development Index, HDI; Disparity Reduction Rates, DRR; and an international comparison program index, IPC. For the PQLI see Morris Morris, Measuring the Condition of the World's Poor. New York: Pergamon Press, 1979. For the HDI see United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report. New York, United Nations, 1990, p. 10. For the DRR see Morris op. cit. and James P. Grant, "Disparity Reduction Rates in Social Indicators." Monograph 11. Washington DC: Overseas Development Council, 1978. For the IPC see Irving B. Kravis et al. "Real GDP per capita in More than One Hundred Countries," Economic Journal, volume 88 (1978), pp. 215-242. A major theme in Hazel Henderson's writings is that better indices of success are needed before scholars can intelligently study whether success is being achieved. See Hazel Henderson, The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981; Hazel Henderson, Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: The Politics and Ethics of the Solar Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. In parallel with efforts to measure the success of development more realistically, there have been efforts to make evaluation procedures more down-to-earth and practical. See, for example, M. Q. Patton, Practical Evaluation. Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1987; A. L. Binnendijk, "Donor Agency Experience with the Monitoring and Evaluation of Development Projects." Evaluation Review. Volume 13 (1989), pp. 206-233. Horacio Walker and Sergio Martinic (eds.), El Umbral de lo Legitimo. Santiago: CIDE, 1987. In these lectures I am supporting the view that the great majority of the theories of development considered in the "development" literature are cultural artifacts limited by the frames of reference characteristic of economics, politics, and sociology. These are disciplines that are themselves products of a modern worldview. "...the philosophies of the Enlightenment period ... formed the basis for economic theory." - Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions. London: Duckworth, 1957. p. 113. For further development of the idea that mainstream social science is limited by being a product of a modern worldview see Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. I am suggesting that the ancient wisdom embodied in traditional cultures, for example in the norm for social justice found in the Acts of the Apostles, "from each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his (or her) needs" should be a part of the "moral and intellectual reform" (to use Gramsci's phrase) that is part and parcel of the process of constructive development. Although I agree with the point Marx made in its context, as a critique of the Gotha program of the German social democrats, his ringing words postponing the realization of the norm of Acts until prosperity is achieved, when taken out of context, are misleading: development should not postpone moral education until capital accumulation is already accomplished; development should from its first steps rescue cooperative values often found in traditional cultures. I am proposing to evaluate development not just with better outcome measures, but also in the light of a theory of cultural action as a means to bring about systematic improvement of cultural norms. In proposing to reconstruct social norms, I am proposing a viewpoint close to anthropology and to behavioral biology, and at the same time close to the historians who study long-term social discontinuity (such as Wallerstein, Karl Polanyi, and the Annales historians). See the works of Wallerstein and Braudel cited in the Notes and References to Lecture One; Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957; The Livelihood of Man. New York: Academic Press, 1977; Essays in Economic Anthropology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977; Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Such a perspective, which takes a frame of reference broader than the economic framework that is usual for "development" theories, can make better sense of the social transformations taking place in our time. Put differently, many "development theories" tend to take the socially constructed modern economic reality for granted, and to study options available within the limited framework allowed by modern assumptions. (Gunnar Myrdal, however, explicitly stated that he was working within the framework of 18th century European thought, making explicit premises that for many others are implicit. See Myrdal, Gunnar, Value in Social Theory. New York: Harper, 1958.) But in our times, so I am arguing, the socially constructed reality of the modern world-system is being transformed into a posteconomic reality. The situation of development theory is like that of the kind of political economy, concerning which the young Marx noted that political economy takes private property as its starting point, but does not explain it. Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Similarly, "development economics" takes the existence of the nation-state and the market for granted, and inquires what the role of the former should be vis-a-vis the latter, but does not explain the origins of either of them, nor how to transcend the Hobson's choice between laissez faire and dirigisme. The diagram from Karl Marx at the beginning of this lecture is a somewhat revised version of ideas expressed in the early pages of the second volume of Das Kapital, of which there are many translations. The second volume deals with the circulation of capital, and although I am using a diagram borrowed from him I am actually modifying the ideas his diagram is designed to express. For Marx, the level of circulation is superficial and derived, as distinct from the level of production (treated in the first volume of Das Kapital), which is profound and primary. The growing insecurity of most of the world's people is documented by Guy Standing of the International Labor Organization in Geneva in, "Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor," World Development, vol. 17 (1989), pp. 1077-1098. Insecurity as a result of a global trend away from "Fordism" and toward "flexible accumulation" is discussed from a theoretical point of view in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Richard Falk has described as "globalization from above" the economic trends that are making the goal of steady and satisfactory employment for the world's growing population an impossible dream, and has concluded that "...what is currently taken to be realistic is not sustainable." Richard Falk, "The Making of Global Citizenship," in Jeremy Brecher et al (eds.) Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order. Boston: South End Press, 1993. Many of the ideas in this lecture are from Howard Richards, The Evaluation of Cultural Action: an evaluative study of the Parents and Children program (PPH). London: Macmillan, 1985. For related ideas on how to evaluate pre-school programs where the main objective is to nurture norms of solidarity in cooperation among children, in their families, and in the communities where they live, see Howard Richards and Loren Pierce, "Cooperative, Community-based Evaluation of Preschool Programs," in Lotty Eldering and Paul Leseman (eds.) Early Intervention and Culture. Paris: UNESCO, 1993. The diagram from Piero Sraffa is found in Sraffa, Piero, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: prelude to a critique of economic theory. London: Cambridge University Press, 1960, p. 3. See also Wassily Leontief, Input-output Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Oskar Lange pointed out that the basic idea that outputs of certain products are inputs for the process of producing other products for technical reasons not determined by consumer demand was recognized in the eighteenth century by Quesnay in his Tableau Economique, but later lost sight of by mainstream economic theories. Oskar Lange, Essays on Economic Planning. Calcutta: Indian Statistical Institute, 1958. p. 40. Hannah Arendt's definition of power is found in her On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1970. p. 43. For "modern economics" see Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, Modern Economics. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Thomas Peters' In Search of Excellence was published in New York by Harper and Row in 1982.
Education for Constructive Development
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