LOOKING BACK: ECONOMICS FORTY YEARS AGO—DEVELOPMENT.

LOOKING BACK: ECONOMICS FORTY YEARS AGO—DEVELOPMENT. Forty years ago in economics, one of the most exciting subjects was a new one. Courses were being offered in Development Economics. Now that England and other Western countries had shown the way, we believed that other countries (“undeveloped countries” then, soon to be known as “lesser developed countries”) should be able to follow their lead, especially because they would be able to take advantage of all that development economists had learned and would learn. I was not as optimistic as some, but the results over the last forty years have been deeply disappointing. My disappointment can be measured by the fact that twenty to forty per cent of the people in the world still live on about one dollar a day, as discussed here.