To grow? Or to develop? Or to…?

Tue, Jan 29, 2013

Like you, I cannot help but pay attention to the news about economic growth. In SVG, our economy — our national output, did not grow during the last three years or so. This year it is supposed to grow. And then there are those nations with a good rate of growth.{{more}} The People’s Republic of China — Beijing — shows constant growth. Brazil, Russia and India also, with China, from a growth quartet called BRIC. When a nation’s output grows, then that is a sign that things are getting better with more jobs, more wages, more investment, more profits, more government taxes and services; and in the same breath, a wider gap between rich and poor, more pollution of the environment, more corruption, more investor greed and more mad rush by consumers to grab at the latest trinket, gadget and symbol of keeping up or catching up with the times. Growth is the anthem that the world sings, runs after and kills for.

I wonder if we are missing something here. When we tie our nation to the growth bandwagon, rolling in two directions – towards wealth and towards poverty – can we pay attention to what we lose in the value that falls overboard as the bandwagon speeds on around corners and jerks over potholes? We don’t. We focus on the miserly returns that working people get in jobs, and we hide up the share of the goods that a few members of our elite scrape off. But let us look at two aspects of the growth industry that we have bought into. We seek and promote economic growth in a society with unequal, unjust and fractured opportunity. When we experience growth, it bears the mark of inequity, it deepens the thrust towards elitism, it makes economic injustice become embedded. It hardens the class barriers against mass opportunity. Growth helps to underdevelop those on the social, political and geographical margins in our SVG.

I like the way Karl Marx and his colleague Engels described consolidated growth in a society. They wrote of “an association (or a society) in which the development of each person is the condition for the development of all”. Everybody does not develop in the same way, but nobody is left behind. Growth becomes a dialectical network activity or operation, which is better called development. A question which we need to look at equally is this. In a period of slow growth or even minus growth, how can a society and nation manage its affairs so that it still develops, it still moves forward in a consolidated way? If we leave aside the focus on growth and growing and redefine our mission as “development”, what are the processes and how do we identify and allocate our resources, and how do we form the Vincentian person and enlarge our spirit for this task?

Now, there are those who do not believe in development, just as I do not believe in growth. They say that “to develop” means to follow fashion, to try to catch up or keep up with (the Jones’) other nations and make their mistakes, and swallow or copy their ideas and values. Don’t develop, “they advise us”. Work out your own forward march with fear, trembling and courage and innovation”.

Well to start with, let us engage in a critical conversation about this “growth” hogwash. We are not alone in this. Doesn’t the UNDP prefer to measure “Human Development” rather than growth?