UNIVERSIDAD SERGIO
ARBOLEDA
HISTORIA DEL
PENSAMIENTO ECONÓMICO
THE PRETENDERS
Ingrid Morris
Sergio Hernández
Guillermo Castro
BAREFOOT ECONOMICS
AND HUMAN SCALE DEVELOPMENT
By Artur Manfred Max Neef
He was born on October 26, 1932, Valparaíso, Chile. He
is a Chilean economist and environmentalist mainly known for his human
development model based on Fundamental human needs. He is of German descent.
Max-Neef started his career as a Professor of economics at the University of
California, Berkeley in the early 1960s.
Max Neef traveled through Latin America and the United States, as a
visiting Professor in various universities, as well as living with and
researching the poor. He worked with the problem of development in the Third
World, describing the inappropriateness of conventional models of development
that have contributed to poverty, debt and ecological disasters for Third World
communities.
In 1981, Max Neef wrote From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in
Barefoot Economics, a narrative of his travels among the poor in South America.
In the same year, he founded CEPAUR (Centre for Development Alternatives).
In 1982, Max Neef won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the
Alternative Nobel Prize, for his work in poverty-stricken areas of developing
countries. Max-Neef ran for President of Chile as an independent in the 1993
election. He achieved 4th place, with 5.55% of the vote.
In 1993, Max Neef was appointed rector of the Universidad Austral de
Chile in Valdivia. He served in that position for eight years.
He is a council member of the World Future Council. On
May 10, 2009, Dr Manfred Max-Neef received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane
Letters and was Commencement Speaker to the 158th Graduating Class of Saint
Francis University (Loretto, Pennsylvania).
Barefoot Economics
“Well, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated
in a concrete experience. I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of
extreme poverty in the sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas, in different
parts of Latin America. At the beginning of that period, one day I was in an
indigenous village in the sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been
raining all the time, and I was standing in the slum. And, across from me,
another guy was also standing in the mud.
Well, we looked at each other, and this was a short
guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife, and a grandmother, and I was the
fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, and so on. And we were
looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent
to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an
economist was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy
because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd…
The first thing you
learn is that in poverty there is an enormous creativity. If you want to
survive, you cannot be an idiot. Every minute you have to be thinking, “what
next?” What do I know? What trick can I do here? What’s this and that, that,
and that? Your creativity is constant. In addition, this is combined with
networks of cooperation, mutual aid, and all sorts of extraordinary things
which you’ll no longer find in our dominant society, which is individualistic,
greedy, and egoistical. It’s just the opposite of what you find there.
And it’s sometimes so
shocking that you may find people much happier in poverty than what you would
find in your own environment, which also means that poverty is not just a
question of money. It’s a much more complex thing.”
Human Scale Development Human Scale Development is defined as "focused
and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of
growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic
articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with
local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy, and
of civil society with the state."
The main contribution that Max-Neef makes to the
understanding of needs is the distinction made between needs and satisfiers.
Human needs are seen as few, finite and classifiable (as distinct from the
conventional notion that "wants" are infinite and insatiable). Not
only this, they are constant through all human cultures and across historical
time periods.
What changes over time and between cultures is the way
these needs are satisfied. It is important that human needs are understood as a
system - i.e. they are interrelated and interactive. There is no hierarchy of
needs (apart from the basic need for subsistence or survival) as postulated by
Western psychologists such as Maslow, rather, simultaneity, complementarity and
trade-offs are features of the process of needs satisfaction.
Max-Neef classifies the fundamental human needs as:
subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation(in
the sense of leisure, time to reflect, or idleness), creation, identity and
freedom. Needs are also defined according to the existential categories of
being, having, doing and interacting, and from these dimensions, a 36 cell matrix
is developed which can be filled with examples of satisfiers for those needs.
Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they
can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers,
singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows that certain
satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or
destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: eg, the arms race, while
ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence,
participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to
meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial
television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with
understanding, creativity and identity - the examples are everywhere.
Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only
satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some
examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education;
democratic community organisations; preventative medicine; meditation;
educational games.
This model forms the basis of an explanation of many
of the problems arising from a dependence on mechanistic economics, and
contributes to understandings that are necessary for a paradigrn shift that
incorporates systemic principles. Max-Neef and his colleagues have found that
this methodology "allows for the achievement of in-depth insight into the
key problems that impede the actualisation of fundamental human needs in the
society, community or institution being studied"
This model provides a useful approach that meets the
requirements of small group, community-based processes that have the effect of
allowing deep reflection about one's individual and community situation, leading
to critical awareness and, possibly, action al the local economic level.
