ABSTRACT
After World War II, development was viewed as a straightforward economic issue: identifying and quantifying the composition of economic growth packages. The Marshall Plan1 aid programs to reconstruct Europe, along with the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, IBRD) created to guide international economic policy, reflected that view. Over time it came to be recognized that numerous social, political, geographical, historical, cultural, psychological, and environmental determinants affect a nation’s prospects for successful development. Most early theorists and practitioners, however, took it as selfevident that economic development is, everywhere and for everyone, a good thing; that technology should be harnessed to all human activities because it boosts productivity; and that specialized institutions are needed to foster modernization. The study of development was seen, not as a philosophical inquiry into value change or a search for new institutions and rules of global governance, but as a technical examination of how to mobilize resources most efficiently and build the infrastructures best suited to growth. Development, in short, was the proper object of study for economics. Moreover, within the economic discipline it was the value-free “engineering” stream of theory, methodology, and analysis which prevailed. As Amartya Sen notes:
economics has had two rather different origins, both related to politics, but related in rather different ways, concerned respectively with ‘ethics,’ on the one hand, and with what may be called ‘engineering,’ on the other . . . The ‘engineering’ approach is characterized by being concerned with primarily logistic issues rather than with ultimate ends and such questions as what may foster ‘the good of man’ or ‘how should one live.’ The ends are taken as fairly straightforwardly given, and the object of the exercise is to find the appropriate means to serve them.2
