The Rhetoric of Economic Development

Peter Bauer has at least the satisfaction of seeing his grimmest prediction come true. As he feared so long ago, economists have on balance hurt economic development, and have hurt it more as the quarrel over equality has intensified. He is not surprised by the contrast between a politicized world and the apolitical Science claimed by the economists in their political advice. Nor should one be. It is not surprising that an economics taking itself to be social engineering should lose its way. Economics around 1950 gave up social philosophy and social history to become a black-board subject. In the name of “Science, ” that magic English word, the scope ofeconomic conversation was narrowed. Economic devel-opment gave room to try out the novel way oftalking. If the govern-ments of Western Europe proved wary of the less sober among the projects of economic engineering, there were now other govern-ments, and intergovernmental governments, waiting to be dazzled. They were dazzled by Scientism, a world religion for a time in the mid-2Oth century. When spelled with a lowercase “s, ” of course, science itself is as old as thinking, of which it is an honorable type. It means merely French science or German Wissenschaft, “system-atic inquiry. ” But the religion of Science with a capital “S, ” a 19th-century English creation, went further: keep facts and values sepa-rate, and then discard the values; keep assertions testable, then relax the tests; keep arguments quantitative, then fudge the numbers. The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (a smarter brother to Karl, the economist and historian wh~was responsible in part for the tur