ABSTRACT
The contemporary literature dealing with the process of economic development appears to be anchored to the axiom that modern economic progress, no matter where or when, has as major explanatory variables the availability of new capital instruments and the acquisition of new technical knowledge. Supporting the views of the writers of the Classical School, too many contemporary development economists have easily concluded that the solution of the problems raised by economic backwardness lies in an adequate injection of capital and of modern technology into underdeveloped economies. This policy prescription was incorporated into Professor H. Leibenstein’s ‘critical minimum effort’ thesis in the 1950s and was adhered to by a large number of writers in the 1960s and the 1970s (Leibenstein, 1957, p. 95). The sophisticated, mathematical models of development which are regarded today as the ‘in-depth’ analyses of the process of economic growth present equations based nearly exclusively on economic and demographic variables. Cultural factors which may explain differences in the economic behavior of a society at different points in time, or between societies within a given time period, or between various groups in a given society, are given minimal importance by the economist who, too often, feels inclined to promote their disappearance by burying them in a vague ceteris paribus assumption. Economists speak of the ‘social consequences of technical change’, never of ‘technical change as a social consequence’. This approach to the study of the historical process of economic development has largely been created by the eagerness with which economists have tried in the last few decades to metamorphose their discipline into a ‘quasi-exact’ science, whose laws should command general validity in any society and in any period of time. A result of the mathematization of economics has been the overstressing of the importance of quantifiable economic variables as the crucial agents of economic change. Development economists, although they may want to deny it, have become the best advocates of the theory of economic determinism. The weight they have given to technology and capital as major forces shaping economic history, their neglect of all aspects of human economic life except the acquisitive, their rejection of all types of human motivation except the avaricious, show how faithful they have remained to the materialistic interpretation of history.
