Absolutism in the Song Dynasty, leading to a critical lack of decentralized creative destruction and absolutist control, perpetuating macro-scale decline...the summation of the last chapter of Why Nations Fail. While absolutely fascinating for a student of development theory, and certainly encompassing the rigor and depth of extraordinary insight, there is something fundamental lacking in this tome, as well as in so many others: the people. Where are the stories of the lives of the people, the poor, the disenfranchised, those affected by these macro-scale struggles? We only hear the stories of the rulers, of the kings, of the absolutist leaders and of the pioneers; what about the lives of those held in sway, those struggling to survive, failing to survive?
I come back often to the words of Robert Chambers, to ground the theory in reality; it can be difficult to incorporate the incredible depths of knowledge, the specializations, with the situations that simple people survive in every day, untouched by this maddening institution that is developmental academia. And most lives in the developing world will continue to never be touched by our PHD's, our scholarly articles, our governance projects and our World Bank partnership deals; the creme is skimmed off of the top, and all those below will never even know of its sweet existence.
What of the lives of the "others?"
I comes back to the words of Chambers (1995: "Whose Reality Counts?")
One may speculate on what topics the poor
and powerless would commission papers if they could convene
conferences and summits: perhaps on greed, hypocrisy and
exploitation. But the poor are powerless and cannot and do not
convene summits; and those papers are rarely written. It is not
surprising: we do not like to examine ourselves. To salve our
consciences we rationalize. Neo-liberalism paints greed as inadvertent altruism. The objects of development are, anyway,
the poor, not us. It is they who are the problem, not us. We are
the solution. So we hold the spotlight to them (from a safe distance). The poor have no spotlight to hold to us.
But poverty and deprivation are functions of polarization, of
power and powerlessness. Any practical analysis has to examine the whole system: - “us”, the powerful as well as “them” the
powerless. Since we have more power to act, it is hard to evade
the imperative to turn the spotlight round and look at ourselves. ..
Our views of the realities of the poor, and of what should
be done, are constructed mainly from a distance, and can be
seen to be constructed mainly for our convenience. We embody
those views in the words and concepts which we use.
