ABSTRACT
V II. P S Y C H O -SO C IA L D E T E R M IN A N T S O F D E V E L O PM E N T The denial of a significant role of capital accumulation in the process of development opens the door to a wide range of alternative explanations of the determinants of development. Popular alternatives in the past have been formal education, learning by doing and processes that prompt efficient resource allocation. At present, popularity tends to favour even more ethereal and less well-defined formulations. Bauer, for example, puts it thus: ‘personal qualities, social institutions and mores, and political arrangements which make for endeavour and achievement’ [1981:194-5], or ‘people’s capacities, attitudes, values and beliefs’ [ibid: 118], It is with disregard to ‘evident determinants of economic achievement, such as personal qualities and social and political arrangements’ that development economists are taxed [ibid: 259],Although Bauer’s more recent formulations have become vaguer, this explanation is not entirely tautological and contentless. If we go back to his earlier versions, examples are given of specific attitudes that are, from the point of view of material progress, favourable (personal responsibility, curiosity, experimentation, assertion of individual rights, desire for acquisition and achievement, dislike of begging) and unfavourable (asceticism, passivity, leisure preference, fatalism, superstition, reverence for animals, purdah of women) [Bauer, 1972:76-9], The basic unit of the theory is not the nation or the individual, however. It is the ethnic group. Some groups have favourable attitudes, and they make material progress; others have unfavourable attitudes and they do not. There you have it. That is why incomes differ. Population policies, international transfers, capital accumulation do not matter, it is said.The similarity of this vision to colonialists’ images of their subject populations is clear enough [Greenberger, 1969: 42-54; Alatas, 1977: 70-81], But such images were faulty in that they were based on imperfect understanding of the culture of subject groups and combined with psychological need for rationalisations and justification for colonial domination. Despite the activities of nineteenth-century physical anthropologists, these images lack any scientific basis, thus achieving only the status of group stereotypes put together from the casual observations of foreigners.The problem here is that one gets the clearest impressions of the places where one has lived longest, and the longer one lives in one place, the less opportunity one has to live in others. Inevitably, mere impressions are biased and the process of generalising from impressions is subject to no form of scientific control. Impressions of differential group behaviour stemming from West Africa, Malaysia and Hong Kong form the backbone of the theory of the psycho-social determinants of development [Lipton, 1983], But, even for these, the causal link running from, for example, the holding of certain attitudes to material success is invariably assumed, but never established, even tentatively. Attempts to link economic performance with ethnic origin have indeed proved inconclusive and with psychological characteristics have yet to be made [Kilby, 1983:107],Because there is so little that is concrete to say about this theory, one ends
