A few weeks back I gave a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in London entitled “Solidarity economics & design”.
The lecture was provoked by the sick-making antics of Bob Geldof and the assumptions he and others made about ‘development’.
I argued that the word ‘development’ implies that we advanced people in the North have the right, or even obligation, to help backward people in the South to ‘catch up’ with our own advanced condition.
And that No, this idea doesn’t make sense.
The concept of development is further devalued, I said, by the impoverished but destructive mindset of economics.
“The North’s purse strings are clutched by people who define development narrowly in terms of growth, jobs and productivity – and ignore broader measures of sustainability and well-being”.
Anyway, I prepared rather thorough (for me) lecture notes and a list of resources – and then forgot to put them online. So here they are now.
