Prosperity, Community and Liberty

The fair and equitable distribution of public resources has been a pressing preoccupation, for those in quest of theoretical just as much as practical understanding, since Plato’s Republic. Calls for one or another notion of distributive equity have prompted some of the most ambitious and confident of recent attempts to draft developmental projects that go much further than “turning a profit.” Increasingly, these are designed to distribute the costs and benefits of large-scale development more evenly across economic sectors, industries and local communities (Policy Studies Journal, 1999). Indeed, during the post-World War II era that gave birth to the modern practice, economic development has underpinned some of the boldest expectations of broad-based material and social progress that, in turn, have inspired ingenious ways of bringing such progress about. Only in recent years, it sometimes seems, has the idea of economic development acquired more sinister overtones. It has been associated, for instance, with problems of housing affordability (DeLeon, 1992), of urban sprawl (Wiewel, 1999), environmental abuse (Mier, 1995) and higher taxes (Krumholz, 1999) – not to mention a host of degenerative conditions for which at least some remedies now exist.



However, any semblance of novelty in this dismay is principally a product of selective inattention. Throughout serious modern reflection on the developmental enterprise and its implications for the flourishing of local populations, there have always been pessimistic notations. From Adam Smith\'s apprehensions that businessmen\'s narrow interests ran contrary to those of the general public, through Alexander Hamilton\'s political strategies for promoting a \"commercial republic,\" to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s recent concerns about our economy’s potential for inflation – there have always been thinkers for whom the idea of economic development has been no occasion for callow optimism.



Nonetheless, the practice proceeds boldly and, for the most part, with unquestioned legitimacy – explainable, it would appear, in terms of its supporting ideation in modern liberal thought, and in the fact that the liberal ethos from which it evolved historically has been so deeply ingrained in the everyday consciousness of Western societies. At least two cardinal, and probably related, events of the past several decades serve to further explain its legitimacy. The first of which was the broad acceptance of behavioralism and positivism in the social sciences following World War II. Observers have noted that this acceptance has loosened over the past quarter century, but very slowly. In the meantime, it has saddled the field with an inordinate amount of intellectual baggage (Foucault, 1972; Fox & Miller, 1994; Street, 1996; Farmer, 1997, 1998) – and much of this was borrowed from capitalism’s managerial concepts, techniques, and negative attitudes toward any theory that might presume to guide an area of policy previously “captured” by that of market economics. The second was the virtually uncontested presumption that – like the administrative state – the developmental enterprise could be morally and politically neutral. Together, once could argue, these events have unleashed upon the field of development a pervasive nihilism that has precluded it from grounding collective standards of distributive equity in anything more transcendent than the simplest of shared utilities – like power, wealth, and the security of one’s immediate personal circumstances.



While the nihilistic influences of liberal thought and political neutrality are themselves deserving of lengthy comment, our present discontent runs a bit deeper than these diagnoses suggest. It has to do with the philosophy by which we justify public policy and the conceptions of citizenship that have come to inform our development policy debates. For the past half-century, for instance, economic and political theorists have debated how we might promote economic growth while assuring broad access to the fruits of prosperity. Though well intentioned, their debates have not spoken to a developing sense that, from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral and material fabrics of our communities are hopelessly unraveling around us. Nor have they spoken to the more deep-seated (“anti-administrative”) sense that, together, we lack the civic resources necessary to sustain self-government (Farmer, 1996). We are fearful, in other words, that the public philosophy by which we live may undermine the very prosperity it promises – mostly because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty (and hence, prosperity) requires. These two fears define the anxiety of our age.



The intent of this article is to question the purpose, significance, and interests that benefit from our current developmental practices and policies, as these, in no small way, have aggravated our anxieties. In a slightly different context, the notion of “anti-administration” (Farmer, 1998) has been proffered as a concept encouraging an opposing, skeptical or critical analysis of the practices and policies of public administration. In much the same way, this article explores local economic development from a critical postmodernist perspective – economic development as “anti-development.” The prefix “anti-” is here used to suggest opinions, sympathies or practices that are generally opposing (Penguin English Dictionary, 1982: 35). This article intends to offer a clearer view of at least some of our more common development policy practices by deconstructing some of the marginalizing effects that characterize the modern practice. Many of these effects emerge as tendencies to frame differences of opinion as indications of “otherness” which, in turn, spawn notions of inequality, making some groups invisible and culminating in acts of exclusion (Schmidt, 1993; Keller, 1983) – as many elected and administrative officials involved in development policy deliberations well know. This article -- which is still in progress -- concludes that local economic development is the most financially consequential area of local policy, and that the public’s political-economic interests would be better served by public servants with strong roles in such deliberations, and that this can be accomplished is by questioning those practices that, by reflecting business models, are too neat, too structured, too exclusive – too modernist.



Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.



About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor of public administration and policy since 1994. Recently, from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. He\'s now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see http://buyfromart.com); he can be reached at info@buyfromart.com.