 Myrdal's methodology what I'm going to do is start by looking at the context and he has six main elements in his methodology which I'll talk about how far they were taken up and what the lessons are for today if any. So let me start with the context. The Cold War was intense when he was writing and he was very very influenced by it. He felt it was just part of the way people thought about things. Indian independence was of course relatively recent and since independence economic growth had been the overwhelming objective and industrialisation of economists visiting economists and also local economists. It's important to know the context of economics in the west which was mainly Keynesian. The economic advisors from the west emphasised therefore they emphasised investment. They followed the Harrod Dymor growth model which he criticised. There were such people as Nerxer and Rosto and others. Economics then and I must say now rarely reflected on its role or the limits of its what underlay it or the limits of what it could say about things. It was even more dominant than it is now. Now for me I was excited by this project because when I started working on development Mirdel's book was coming out and I read it as I started looking around as I was living in Kenya and it was really had a huge effect on me. I really has influenced the way I've thought about things ever since and to me it was it really spoke to me so I was excited to go back to it to see if it still speaks to me. So here I'm going to consider the six elements of the critique what he said, how far they were taken up by others and the relevance today of the message. So the six elements just to tell you briefly and I'll go through them one by one. The beam in our eyes, the political element in analysis, the question of values and the definition of development, the social system and its five major categories, tentatively multidisciplinarity and the inapplicability of Western economics which was sort of the bottom line of everything he said what he was trying to prove. Now of course these six are connected they're not really logically separate and I accept that and I think Mirdel would accept that but I'm going to treat them separately. So the beam in our eyes basically what he's saying is we are not impartial observers and when I you can see any anything in italics on the power point a quotes from Mirdel. So personal and social conditioning influence the way we think. Every scientist is social scientist is conditioned by the society in which they live and the political climate. A disinterested social scientist has never existed and when talking about economists only about the peculiar behaviour of our own profession do we choose to remain naive. That instantly applies today too. The beam influences everything it influences what we say normatively, what we say positively, what approach we use, what concepts we use, what data we collect. Now that beam is widely recognised today by postmodern analysis and in fact you could say that a lot of postmodern analysis is about the beam but it is not by mainstream economists. It was at the time and there's some very good papers which I'm sure many of you've read by Dudley Sears who was making much the same point but instead of making it in 2,300 pages he made it in 30 pages and it was less taken up but there you go. Coming to the political element in analysis. For Mirdel the Cold War was the political element and he was as I said very much influenced by it and he thought that it influenced the sort of policies people advocated. You know we were advocating weaving the west, advocating development because we want to compete against the eastern bloc, it justified aid, it was just informed everything and so he was very conscious of that. Today that Cold War approach obviously not quite so data as it used to be but still seems dated and politics remain important but they're not necessarily that politics, they remain important in a distribution. What he didn't say and I think today is what I would say is he neglected the economic element, the economic interests underlying our analysis. He didn't say anything about how western economic interests are served by the type of economics they give you. That western economic interests want free trade, they want free movement of capital but they want recognition of property rights because otherwise they wouldn't get too much out of the technology and so on so forth. So there's a lot of economic interests behind economics but he didn't recognise those, he was always talking about the political element. Values and concepts, valuations enter into the choice of approach, the selection of problems, the definition of concepts and so on and so forth. In fact as he concludes most writings particularly in economics remain in large part simply ideological, values inform everything we do. For example in the choice of approach do we look just at what we call the economics, realm or do we look beyond? Which problems do we look at? Values determine that, are we going to be hung up on stabilisation inflation or are we going to look at social cohesion or individual happiness and so on. The definition of concepts, he spent a lot of time on that. Unemployment and employment, why do we focus on that and in fact I remember we went on a long time ago a ILO Kenya mission in which it was supposed to be employment and it immediately became apparent that western concept of employment was completely inappropriate and that one had to look at the informal sector and you know jobs, western jobs wasn't the right way to look at it and he had a lot of criticism of that, a lot of criticism of the concepts of investment and consumption because he says a lot of what we call consumption or what we then called consumption in fact contributes to future productivity and in particular health, education but also food so again I think there's much more recognition now that that is the case although we haven't changed the definition in the national accounts, the national accounts still have these things as consumption rather than investment but I think in terms of analytics we do recognise that many of these items are both consumption and investment goods. He argued that western values are typically assumed without discussion and that transparency was needed, we need to make explicit the value premises applied in social study both for logical clarity and for the avoidance of hidden valuations that lead to biases and then he went on to say that values should be local, it's not from the viewpoint of the foreign observer but from the viewpoint of those valuations that have relevance and significance in the countries, a very important point but then whose values, whose values in the countries, this is where he's in modern day terms as a little controversial because he said should reflect actual valuations held by people who are concerned with the problems being studied and who are influential in moulding public policy in other words the elite decision makers and those were the people he went to for the values and he was actually quite explicit about wanting to go to those people because he had a very contemptuous view of the population as a whole who it felt was satisfied in their state of under development and would not want modern what he called modernisation values so he just looked to the elite for the local values. So how did he arrive at them? He said he went to the politically alert, articulate and active part of the population, read their speeches and talked to them and came to a set of values which he called modernisation values, they include rationality, superstitious beliefs and illogical reasoning should be abandoned, development, planning, equalisation, changed attitudes and institutions, national consolidation, democracy. Look at those values carefully, what are they? They are Scandinavian values. So despite all the talk about the beam in his eye and the beam came out again here because the method of arriving at values was to talk to people who already basically agreed with the western observer in this case, Gunnar Mildal. And so although I very much accept what he says about values in terms of why not to look at other people's values I don't think that he did so he just took his own values really. Now today it's accepted in theory that people should be consulted and we have for example a lot of participatory processes that he used. We also have Sen's view that you have deliberative democracy that you have discussions and so on and something comes out of that which is the local values. But and the methods we use today are much more sophisticated and much more comprehensive than Mildal. We look at, we try and take the values of poor as well as rich and we don't only look at the elite. For example Robert Chambers has obviously led the work, led the work on that and a lot of subsequent work has been done. Yet there are main problems. For example at one point obviously a decade or two ago I was looking at these so-called PRSP's poverty reduction strategy papers which were drawn up after huge amounts of consultation and actually reflected IMF values when you looked at the details. Second there's a problem with heterogeneity of views. You have a group and some people think one thing and some people think another. The person who's doing the exercise orchestrating it can really interpret it as they want so it's not so straightforward. And basically there is almost no consultation on macroeconomic policy. There's lots of consultation about whether you have a school here or there, a water well here or there, would you prefer water or schools? That's a good thing to have, good consultation. But when it comes to macroeconomic policy which impolwyrs everything the local opinion makers are just not there. I mean you need to read Adults in the Room which explains in the Greek case how little the Greek sophisticated economists could, little contribution they could make to decisions on macroeconomic policy. And also today local values are overridden. For example in Mongolia and Kyrgystan they wanted to have some universal benefits and IMF and World Bank insisted on targeting and of course they won. So even though we are now accepting local values much more there's a lot of tokenism including I think in drawing up the SDGs which are thought of as wonderful global goals but when you think about it it's very much a myrdalium exercise of just talking to the elite and coming up with the goals that people have thought of already and which are disagreed with in many places. Not every country wants gender equality for example. I mean there are a lot of disagreements about in the world about which values to have. All right his five categories these are the five categories output and incomes conditions of production you can read them. His big big big emphasis on institutions are approaches mainly institutional and he includes the nature of the state as a very important actor and he criticised economists for neglecting these five factors and just looking at investment and growth and so on. Of course the five are not completely separate they have a lot of links levels of living output and incomes are very highly linked. And there isn't a clear distinction between instruments and objectives. But the importance of the five things is they point to circular causation that is that if you fail on one you may hold back everything on the other and the other hand if you succeed on one or two you might push things forward. Now it's quite interesting here to reflect on myrdal because myrdal said these five are so interconnected that we're not going to get development in Asia really. He was very pessimistic where it was really interesting because he used very much the same methodology for his great book an American Dilemma in which he looked at the situation of black Americans and had very much the same views about the circular causation on this that and the other but there he thought that if you pushed forward on one you'd get progress on the others but in Asia he thought the opposite. And in fact of course it turned out he was wrong in both cases. He was wrong in Asia but as we've heard and we'll hear further Asia did transform and he was wrong in US they still have a terrible problem. So that's very interesting to reflect on. So what about current views about the five factors? I think we generally recognise that levels of living effect productivity. The importance of institutions is of course absolutely central to analysis. Maybe not interpreted quite as broadly as he did but central. It's totally agreed that the state is critical. He had this concept of soft state and hard state and only hard states could really get policy change and many have people have worked on that and I think we generally agree about circular causation. If you go forward on one front you need to go forward on several fronts simultaneously to be successful. What happened and I've already said that he was over pessimistic for Asia. I think following what happened I think is much more reflects what Hirshman found. I don't know if you remember that he wrote this book about the hiding hand and that in the end of the day even bad projects turn into good projects. And here he's saying that there's a long list of prerequisites for development and you'd think you'd never get any development but in the end you do get development because in some mysterious way you don't really have to have that long list of prerequisites as long as you go forward in some ways other things catch up. So I think in a way Asia followed Hirshman more. Incidentally of course Hirshman was talking about Latin America which probably followed Mirdalmore so it was a sort of paradox. He talked about the need for multidisciplinarity. So if we are correct about the five factors then we need more interdisciplinary research and we should welcome efforts by sociologists and others to improve our system of theories and concepts. But he did see that there were some problems in multidisciplinary work which I think we all recognise they remain problems and he did argue that economics should remain in the lead. He felt that the economists were more political and more dynamic than other disciplines so he didn't abandon the imperialism of economics and his own team was almost entirely consisting of economists. I would say today we totally recognise the need for interdisciplinarity but it remains true that I think economics remains king and we do have problems about interdisciplinarity. The inappropriateness, the sixth point, the inappropriateness of western concepts. Because they're inappropriate because they reflect the value and motivation of western economists and they abstract and this is very important. Francis it's 15 minutes now. Okay so I better speed up. They abstract from attitudes and institutions because they assume they're the same as the west and I gave the examples earlier. And others made very similar points and some of them were before him. I mean Joan Robinson in 1960 said exactly the same point. Dudley Sears made the same point and I really want to point to Mukherjee because Indian economist, sociologist and economist and he made exactly the same point before middle. So is this accepted? It's accepted with respect to particular concepts but not in general. In general development economics which at that point was rather different from the rest has sort of suffered a death and we've got much more feeling that there's just one economics. I think heterodoxy economists like myself and many people in this room are more prepared to accept this point but orthodox economists don't. Another point that he didn't really pick up with the respect to Asian drama is of course that the concepts are often inappropriate for the west too it's not just for developing countries but it's also for the west. He had made that point at some point earlier but in Asian drama he didn't and I think that was because Keynesian economics was so dominant and that did seem relevant. So in sum the ideas that are now broadly accepted that development is a normative project, that local people should decide on priorities, that development is holistic and interconnected, that context matters, that we need an interdisciplinary approach. None of these entirely do to middle. Others have made similar points and little dialogue but they are all very important points and they're all accepted I think by many in theory not always in practice. The ideas that are probably not accepted or certainly not adopted at beam in our eyes very few economists recognise sort of beam in their eyes and explain where they come from when they write a paper. The underdevelopment trap turned out not to be right in the Asian case. Let me move on to where we need to go beyond Myrdal. I think this is my final slide. We need to work on the practice of multidisciplinarity. We need to identify local values in a more sophisticated way and we need to recognise the contribution of local scientists. I was really shocked writing this paper. I began getting into early Indian economists not early but early 20th century ones. They'd made all these points and they were not even referred to in Asian drama and in a book which is talking about the importance of local values. I found it totally shocking and even word for word the importance of institutions and so forth the irrelevance of western concepts it was and even the five elements you know the interconnectedness they were all there. I think we need to question the appropriateness of concepts in every context not just in the south but it's in the north too and of course there's been a convergence of problems of north and south. Thank you. you