ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the basic contrast between theories of surplus and transfer and theories of interdependence are applied to two subfields: development economics, in both its Lewis 'classical' and 'basic needs' variants, and Polanyi-Pearson economic anthropology. Materiality criteria were commonplace until the 1970s in development economics, a field that, scandalous to say, scarcely existed until World War II, the decline of the British Empire, and the emergence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a superpower. Although non-Comecon poor countries did not adopt Soviet-style national accounts, thereby avoiding institutionalization of materialist fallacy, poverty was nevertheless widely conceived as material poverty, and 'industrialization' was viewed as the principal means of escape. For economies and societies of other times and places, Polanyi suggests, 'material production' may not be analytically separable from activities that appear to Smitho-Marxian materialists or even pre-public-choice neoclassical economists as falling 'outside the economic domain'.
