Manfred Max-Neef and the Human Scale Development

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.