Problems of underdevelopment: an economist's view.

Abstract

The profession I represent, economics, has a reputation not wholly undeserved for being one of the smugger and more self-satisfied of the social sciences. In the presence of physicists, chemists and to a lesser extent biologists, economists tend to be apologetic and insecure about the achievements of their discipline. But when economists are confronted with representatives of the other social sciences, the frustrations built up in them by the contrast of muddy economics with the purity and achievements of the natural sciences take themselves out in aggressive attacks on sociology, anthropology, social psychology and political science as not really disciplines at all. Opinion leadership in economics, when it is frank and honest, tends to be intellectually more isolationist than the other social sciences, to deprecate what they can contribute and to regard forays into interdisciplinary investigation with some scorn. The problems of economic development with which we are here concerned have thrown up a challenge to this attitude with which economists are bravely but as yet not too successfully wrestling. The reasons for this state of mind are various. Economics is, to be sure, one of the oldest of the social sciences, having existed as an identifiable discipline for better than two centuries. Quantification, measurement and the representation of reality in mathematical models have for some time been the hallmark of disciplines accepted in the scientific fraternity, and economics has had a strong quantitative bias from its beginnings with Quesnay and the English mercantilists. Its conclusions have always been based on fairly simple assumptions about human behavior, but these have been tucked away in its postulate system in places not easily accessible to the noneconomist.