ABSTRACT
In spite of all the ideological prescriptions and endeavours by all national and international development agencies, the failure of the ‘developing’ countries to show signs of real material and human development begs serious, mundane explanation. Questions regarding the quality of human life, the environment and intra- and inter-generational equity reveal that edematous swellings on selected privileged strata of society have so far been depicted as signs of improved economic health. In particular, the growth of GNP and the concomitant steady decline of the environmental and human health in most ‘developing’ countries indicate that classical and neo-classical parameters and indices of development do not adequately portray reality, and that some of the fundamental assumptions in the discipline of economics are fallacious. Nevertheless, as Paul Sweezy (1972: 57) recognized, the resistance to the abandonment of old paradigms and the adoption of new ones is indeed ‘more stubborn in social sciences than in the natural sciences’. The fundamental weakness of the standard economic discourse is that it keeps too many real life factors as ‘externalities’ that lie ‘outside the self-imposed limits of orthodox economics, which is therefore condemned to increasing irrelevance and impotence’ (Sweezy 1972: 59). In what follows, we shall briefly dwell on the various flaws in the founding concepts of the mainstream economics, and subsequently, the recent corrective endeavours undertaken by a handful of ecologically oriented interdisciplinary researchers.
