Word: westerns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...recent letter (CRIMSON, Monday, October 29). Professors Bowles and MacEwan join in the attack on the Center for International Affairs that your paper has done so much to make fashionable. They also embark on a related critique of "Western economists." Professors Bowie. Vernon and others at the Center are able I am sure, to defend themselves against. Bowles and MacEwan. Comment by one not associated with the Center may be in order, though, on some of their strictures on "Western economists...
...begin with, such persons take the "maximization of per capita income" as the "primary objective of poor countries, even though this implies "an acceptance of the status quo on income distribution." There are, of course, Western economists and Western economists, but Bowles and MacEwan are obviously right that in Western treatment of economic development attention has focused much more on per capital income growth than on income equality. Very possibly, too, a greater concern for equity would often be to the good. This might be so not only in terms of the economists' more ultimate goal of "social welfare...
Bowles and MacEwan also tell us that the "human costs of rapid economic growth... the fracture of a community, for example-are seldom considered." Few Western economists need to be told of the "human costs of rapid economic growth," though more familiar examples are urban congestion and pollution, and many will join in regretting that such costs are not given more weight in actual development programs...
...also informed that in the upshot "development policy is consistently biased... against revolution as a means." Among the principal revolutions of current interest are those of a communist sort, and Western economists no doubt do tend to be unenthusiastic about such revolutions...
According to Webster's. however, a "bias" is a "prejudice," and if Bowles and MacEwan mean anything by their allegation it must be that the Western economist is not only predisposed against communist revolutions, but that the predisposition is indefensible. It should be observed, therefore, that such a predisposition might stem, among other things, from an awareness that communist societies too are, by all accounts, not especially attentive to "human costs of rapid growth" such as described. The predisposition might also reflect a concern for other "human costs" as well, human costs represented by, for example, the incarceration of millions...