Economic Development

The acceptance of goals of economic development as desirable by adherents of divergent ethical and political philosophies at once raises questions of the criteria by which the effects of that complex process are to be judged. Church social teaching has for a long time examined the moral implications of economic growth during the periods of industriali? zation in Europe and North America and has passed severe judgment on the materialist ethic in crude forms of Marxist and classical liberal economic thought. Few commentators today would thus attempt to identify all economic growth with moral improvement any more than they would make a saint out of the classical fiction of the economic man. Nevertheless, with the emergence of independent but underdeveloped nations in the years since the end of World War II, emphasis in eco? nomic, political and social thought has been on the benefits associated with economic development. Without abandoning the qualifications on economic progress found in earlier encyclicals, Pope John XXIII in Mater et Magistra stressed the moral importance of a high standard of living with particular reference to the obligations of developed nations toward the underdeveloped areas.1 Those benefits of economic development that contain moral or ethical implications have been described often enough to warrant only a mention here.2 Thus, without committing themselves to a naive ma? terialist identification of wealth with human happiness, the welfare economist and the moralist can agree that higher standards of living contribute to human freedom by extending the range of human choices and hence the opportunities for responsible and virtuous human behavior. Economic growth creates both opportunities for increased religious and cultural leisure time activities and the opportunities to increase material contribution of men and nations toward satisfying the needs of others. Like many applications of achievements in the physical sciences, opera? tion of a developing economy gives man the kind of increased control over his environment that should satisfy the author of the Book of Genesis as much as the author of The Theory of Economic Growth.3 Nevertheless, because there is not a perfect correspondence between economic and moral well-being, but rather a relationship operating through effects of development on the conditions of human freedom, we must acknowledge as effects of development alternative possibilities that 21

Development economics · Economics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Happiness · Marxist philosophy · Materialism · Normative · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Standard of living · Warrant · Global History, Politics, and Ideology · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Law · Philosophy

• The Liberalization of The Scholastic Theory of Socio-Economic Policy

  Frank Petrella•Review of Social Economy•1972

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• Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force

  Open Access•Mancur Olson•The Journal of Economic History•1963

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