The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change

Front matter

OXFORD

The Many Faces of Socioeconomic

Change

Foreword

This ambitious work covers over three centuries of development and thinking about development. It is impressive in its scale - in coverage of thought and time and of theory and contexts. Many Faces provides brilliant sketches of the ideas of a huge range of thinkers. Stimulating, provocative and enjoyable, it is an excellent reflection of the breadth, depth, and erudition of John Toye himself.

John, who sadly died in 2021, was a scholar, historian, and development analyst who invariably assumed the role of Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ in exploring and evaluating development issues. He was an economist, but not in the narrow, technical, ahistorical form that dominates contemporary economics. John was immersed in ideas, not just methods, about how to understand the opportunities for human flourishing. These qualities are all apparent in The Many Faces.

The world has changed massively and at an accelerating rate over the last three centuries. The focus of the book is on the views of the major analysts of development rather than the actual processes of transformation that occurred. The vast changes in the role of the state, the structure of the economy, ideas about individuals and collectives, the class composition of society, trade and globalization, education and technology, and incomes and poverty, over these centuries form a quiet background to the evolving analysis.

It soon becomes clear from John’s account that the insights and arguments of the early thinkers - Adam Smith, Ferguson, Petty, Herder, Montesquieu, Condorcet, Guizot - remain amazingly relevant. Their thinking is so frequently echoed in later writings. For example, many of the early authors observed and predicted that capitalist development would result in rising inequality — look at the work of contemporary scholars (Atkinson, Milanovic, Piketty, and so many others) to see these debates continuing. Others noted that capitalism was associated with the creation of artificial wants such that there would never be enough goods or services to reach an equilibrium in which all were satisfied: reflecting the present-day dilemmas of unsustainable levels of consumption and resource use.

Contemporary debates (and deep anxieties) about identity and conflict are also in evidence. In the late 18™ century, Herder noted that there was not one

Foreword culture but many, and that each was to be valued - presaging some of the views of Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence. Montesquieu argued that the development of commerce would reduce conflict (‘doux commerce’), a controversial perspective which is still contested. (As we write Russia’s post-1990 engagement with capitalist commerce seems anything but ‘doux’ as it applies its oil and gas-created wealth to invading Ukraine and threatening nuclear warfare). The 19" century debates the book explores, concerning the objectives of development-utility maximization, human rights - presage contemporary discussions on the relative importance of incomes, happiness, and capabilities as overriding objectives.

The title of John’s book (The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change) can be taken in two very different directions. On the one hand, as the manifold ways in which the concept of ‘development’ can be interpreted — as a normative project, or as an analysis of the dynamics of societal change, or as a set of interventions in which societies are consciously developed, usually by elites and often by outsiders. Alternatively, the many faces may reflect the different trajectories that countries have taken, as illustrated in chapter four of this volume, presenting fascinating vignettes on the differing trajectories of Japan, China, Russia, and India. This book provides rich insights on both interpretations.

Historically most of those writing about development provide optimistic analyses — envisaging the possibilities, even likelihood, of progress, and often valiantly claiming that they know how to achieve it. Rostow went furthest in this view, perhaps, arguing around 1960 that a dozen or more countries could achieve self-sustaining growth by 1970. Yet, perhaps befitting the role of an ‘impartial spectator’, Toye himself is more downbeat in his conclusion. In the final chapter he suggests that neo-liberalism may be ‘the last grand narrative of development’, as those who analyze development focus on micro-level studies and randomized control trials. We should not take this conclusion as definitive, but rather as indicative: a challenge to future generations of thinkers. As the book shows so powerfully, brilliant and creative thinkers have been responsible for successive grand narratives of development that have waxed and waned and returned over the centuries. It seems highly unlikely that this will or should stop now.

Frances Stewart, Professor Emeritus of Development Economics, University of Oxford and DSA President 1990-1992

David Hulme, Professor of Development Studies, University of Manchester and DSA President 2014-2017 viii

Preface

Anyone who has spent an adult lifetime lecturing to university students, as I have, has probably shared my experience of bafflement when meeting again former students who quote back to me things that they recall from my lectures and has wondered: Did I really say that? I wonder why? What could I have meant? Is it true? Yet my aphorisms, whatever they were, had made a lasting impression on at least one hearer.

We are very impressionable in our student days, and I recall mine with greater clarity than I do my time as a lecturer. One incident remains vividly in my memory. When I was first studying the economics of development, I attended a class given by the young Bill Warren, a Glaswegian and a neo- Marxist, on the activities of trades unions in Africa. Warren gave an interesting and well-informed account of their structure, behaviour, and impact on the labour market. The Head of the Department was sitting in on the class, presumably as part of some sort of quality control exercise, and at the end of the class complained in the hearing of everyone in the room: ‘Bill, you are supposed to be teaching the young people economics, but what you are teaching them is sociology!’

My first reaction to this reprimand was one of indignation on behalf of the young lecturer whom the Head of Department had crassly humiliated in front of his students. My next thought was of the absurdity of insisting on analysing development by means of an economic logic that is devoid of social content. How could an economics that has nothing to say about the operations of the trade unions produce a credible analysis of the labour market in Africa, or anywhere else?

In the past fifty years, the separation of economics and non-economic disciplines has worsened, for reasons that I have discussed elsewhere. The growing intellectual distance has been camouflaged by the move by economists onto subject matter previously treated by other social science specialists—historians, sociologists, and political analysts. The emergence of the economics of politics is by no means a move towards convergence of disciplines or disciplinary cooperation: it is an assertion of the relevance of the economists’ toolkit of parsimonious modelling, data collection, and econometrics to subjects previously analysed by other methods, now condemned as ‘primitive’ and ‘soft’.

Preface

A recent example of the expansion of economic methods into novel subject areas is the analysis of civil wars in developing countries. The method was used to formulate a simple algebraic model of the costs and benefits of rebellion for potential rebels. This confers a false air of precision on fuzzy concepts. Numerical proxies are then regressed on the outbreak of civil wars. The regression statistics are satisfactory, so a new universal proposition is announced: civil wars result from greed, not grievance.

This is a false dichotomy. Material conditions clearly have a role in starting or prolonging conflicts, but individualistic theories validated by fragile empirical proxies sweep specificity and contingency out of sight and generate explanations that are reductionist and misleading.

Specific rebellion scenarios must be understood in their social context. These are often struggles over distribution and to that extent involved the motive of greed, but in Southern Nigeria, for example, there was also a motive of grievance—the gross and self-serving corruption of public officials. Traditional mechanisms for ensuring accountability were available to legitimate remedies for the grievances of the marginalized. The formation of youth militias and vigilante groups is a recognized community response for pursuing accountability and rectifying grievance. To treat rebellion as the outcome of a cost/benefit calculation is an oversimplification. To ask whether a rebellion’s cause is either greed or grievance is to set up a false dichotomy: most rebellions will be driven by both.

The greed or grievance controversy illustrates a broader point. An attempt to focus narrowly on economic concepts in theorizing involves stripping away and discarding sociological variables, especially when they are difficult to measure. This residue is often referred to as ‘the sociological tangle’, but it provides the social context in which economic models produce their results. Development is too large a subject to be reduced to economic development. Economics without sociology is only half of the story; most the great writers on the subject realized that they needed to analyse socioeconomic development.

Acknowledgements

The original idea for this book came from Sophie Ahmed when she was a commissioning editor at Polity Press. I wrote the first two draft chapters quickly enough, but my responsibilities as Director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex precluded further work on the draft. I thank Sophie for her understanding in releasing me from my contract.

The experience of co-directing the E.S.R.C.-funded Global Poverty Research Group strengthened my interest in the interface between economics and sociology in the history of development theory. I would like to pay a special tribute to David Hulme, who co-directed the Group, and to thank its members who contributed to the special issue of the Journal of Development Studies (Volume 42, Number 7, December 2006).

I owe a great debt to Adam Swallow, the Economics Editor at Oxford University Press, for agreeing that I should make a fresh start in the writing of the book; for his kindness and patience when I suffered various forms of ill health that made me miss deadlines; and for his astute editorial comments when the draft text was finally submitted. For the past few months, I have been fortunate in having the services of two good research assistants, Ola Akintola in Oxford and Peerapat Chokesuwattanaskul in Cambridge, and I wish to thank them warmly for their help in completing the manuscript. Finally, I must express my gratitude to those friends and colleagues who have offered me encouragement and support, and various forms of practical assistance. Without implying that they would agree with the contents of this book I mention Tony Atkinson, Ha-Joon Chang, Valpy Fitzgerald, Richard Kozul-Wright, Finn Tarp, and Richard Toye.

I have been extremely fortunate in receiving the assistance of an excellent production team at Oxford University Press. I would like to thank Katie Bishop, Lisa Eaton, and Charles Lauder very sincerely for all their efforts on my behalf during the publishing process for this book. They have made every allowance for my physical limitations and diminished capacities. I greatly appreciate their care and consideration.

John Toye Pinehurst, Cambridge December 2016

Contents

= e - O

. Introduction to ideas of development

. Colonial development by intersector labour transfer, 1950-69 . Development as take-off, 1950-75