Towards a working model and goal setting

Abstract

Economic activities emerge and evolve within an institutional framework underpinned by adequate ideological structures. Therefore to understand means and objects of economic actions it is necessary to examine their ideological roots and the moral and ethic background of their institutions. In this sense we begin this chapter with a quick view of several notions like development, growth, employment and institutions, to mention only a few, which are in various ways linked to the present essays. This brings us to touch on some issues of political economy that we comment cursorily.

Susan George (see [80], pp. 23)

Hunger is not an unavoidable phenomenon like death and taxes. We are no longer living in the seventeenth century when Europe suffered shortages on an average of every three years and famine every ten. Today's world has all the physical resources and technical skills necessary to feed the present population of the planet or a larger one. Unfortunately for millions of people who go hungry, the problem is not a technical one — nor was it wholly so in the seventeenth century, for that matter. Whenever and wherever they live, rich people eat first, they eat a disproportionate amount of the food there is and poor on es rarely rise in revolt against this most basic of oppressions unless specifically told to ‘eat cake’. Hunger is not a scourge but a scandal.

The present world political and economic order might be compared to that whieh reigned over social-dass relations in individual countries in nineteenth-century Europe — with the Third World now playing the role of the working class. All the varied horrors we look back upon with mingled disgust and incredulity have their equivalent, and worse, in Asia, Africa and Latin American countries where over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called ‘absolute poverty’. And just as the ‘propertied classes’ of yesteryear opposed every reform and predicted imminent economic disaster if eight-year-olds could no longer work in the mills, so today those groups that profit from poverty that keeps people hungry are attempting to maintain the status quo between the rich and poor world.