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Today's episode will be the last of a part of a 3-part series where I, your host, Nathan Greene, interview a group of my current professors here at Clark University. I was first introduced to the concept of development in my economic growth and development course at St. John's University. There, we explored how economic growth led to improvements in living standards that allowed people to achieve their full potential. This is what Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen calls his capability approach: when societies are able to produce the conditions necessary for people to flourish. But, since coming to Clark, my idea of development has changed. I began to separate economic development from general development. Growth wasn't always desirable, and could even lead to entrenched inequalities, environmental degradation, or accumulation by dispossession. So I want to ask you, what does development mean to you? Is it different from economic growth? Are the two mutually exclusive? And, should we even strive for economic growth? To answer these questions, I've enlisted the help of three of my professors, who have helped shape my understanding of development. Today, we'll be speaking with Dr. Dave Bell to get a metaphysical understanding of what development really means. Dr. David Bell is an international education consultant trained in psychology. He is the founder and director of Ubuntu Consulting, an educational evaluation company, where he works as a program evaluation consultant, designing and assessing education initiatives both in the U.S. and globally. Before moving to the United States, Dr. Bell worked extensively in Southern Africa, focusing on community development and educational improvement. He has worked at numerous international NGOs focussing on social change, such as the Center for Cognitive Development, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Karuna Center for peace building. Much of Dr. Bell's research explores transformational leadership, experiential learning, and the role of education in development. He earned his bachelor's degree in Education and Counseling Psychology from the University of Port Elizabeth, his master's in Education and Counseling Psychology from Rhodes University, and his doctorate of education in Education Policy, Research Administration, and Comparative Education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Bell joined the Henry George School to discuss what development means to different people, the difference between economic growth and development, and why people conceptualize these two things so differently. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support
Today's episode will be part of a 3-part series where I, your host, Nathan Greene, interview a group of my current professors here at Clark University. I was first introduced to the concept of development in my economic growth and development course at St. John's University. There, we explored how economic growth led to improvements in living standards that allowed people to achieve their full potential. This is what Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen calls his capability approach: when societies are able to produce the conditions necessary for people to flourish. But, since coming to Clark, my idea of development has changed. I began to separate economic development from general development. Growth wasn't always desirable, and could even lead to entrenched inequalities, environmental degradation, or accumulation by dispossession. So I want to ask you, what does development mean to you? Is it different from economic growth? Are the two mutually exclusive? And, should we even strive for economic growth? To answer these questions, I've enlisted the help of three professors, who helped shape my understanding of development. Today, we'll be speaking with Dr. Denise Bebbington to get a macro-level understanding of the impacts of economic growth. Dr. Denise Bebbington is currently a research associate professor at Clark University, where she is the co-director of the Center for the Study of Natural Resources Extraction and Society, a research institute within Clark. Before she became a professor, Dr. Bebbington worked as a representative to Peru for the Inter-American Foundation, South American regional sub-director for Catholic Relief Services, and Latin America Program Coordinator for the Global Greengrants Fund. She has extensive on-the-ground experience working on development projects in South America, especially when it comes to democratization and strengthening institutions. Her research focuses on the political ecology of Latin America's extractives industries and how it impacts indigenous communities. Her writings explore the intersection of gender, the environment, and development. She has authored and coauthored numerous books and articles for publications such as Environmental Science and Policy, World Development, the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, as well as many others. She earned her bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley in history, her master's in Development Management from American University, and her PhD in Development Policy and Management from the University of Manchester. Together we discussed why conventional economic indicators like GDP fail to capture the true development story of a country, Latin America's growth in the 21st century, and why large-scale infrastructure projects tend to be disruptive to peoples' way of living. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support
Nearly thirty years ago, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “More than 100 Million Women are Missing.” Sen didn't mean “missing” as in “missing person.” He meant that in places like China and his native India there were more than 100 million fewer women than demographic trends suggested there should be. Two decades later, journalist Mara Hvistendahl wrote “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” By the time of the book's publication, the estimate of missing women had grown to 160 million. The “elephant in the room” behind this terrible trend is abortion. Demographers and other researchers first thought that the explanation must be that female infanticide—you know, the kind practiced in the ancient world—had somehow made a comeback. Instead, they discovered that female children were being identified in utero, via amniocentesis or ultrasound, and then they were aborted. The combination of technology, preference for male children, government policies such as China's infamous “One-Child Policy,” and legalized abortion had altered demographics from China to Albania. Still, researchers downplayed this connection between abortion and the 100-million plus missing women. Hvistendahl, for example, placed far more emphasis on cultural attitudes and discrimination against women. While these factors certainly play a role in the gender imbalance, without easy access to abortion this problem wouldn't exist, at least not in its present form. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes the connection between abortion and gender imbalance more explicit. Researchers from Britain concluded that between 1970 and 2017, “sex-selective abortions resulted in about 23.1 million missing baby girls.” According to a demographer from the American Enterprise Institute, that number “seems a bit low.” In China and India alone, men outnumber women by 70 million. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has estimated that by next year, 24 million Chinese men of marriageable age will be unable to find a spouse. Since mortality rates are much higher for men than women, either Chinese and Indian women are exceptionally unlucky, or, as is more likely, the lion's share of that 70-plus million represents women who were killed as the result of sex-selection abortion. That's why both China and India have done what the U. S. has not: outlaw sex-selection abortion. While their laws are honored more in the breach than in the observance, at least China and India have acknowledged the problem. The cultural preference for boys and systemic discrimination against girls is nothing new. But the radical gender imbalance in places like China and India is. Not coincidentally, that imbalance emerged just as abortion became readily available in the 1970s. To put it bluntly, legal abortion made it easier to eliminate unwanted daughters. To put it even more bluntly, gendercide isn't the result of people having abortions for the “wrong reason”—it's the result of abortion itself. And though a sexist act of violence halfway around the world should be just as intolerable to us as if it were happening in our own backyard, make no mistake. Elective abortion leads to sex-selective abortion. It is happening in America, too. Of course, getting abortion-rights advocates to acknowledge this is like trying to swim against the current of the Ganges from the Bay of Bengal to its source in the Himalayas. Good luck with that. Still, the savage truth is hundreds of millions of missing women is the price we've paid for legalized abortion. It's the elephant in the room, and it isn't going anywhere.
In February 2009, Deconstructing Dinner descended upon Edmonton for a week of local and global food education. Every year, the University of Alberta hosts International Week, the largest annual extracurricular educational event on campus. International Week "fosters global citizenship through engagement with today's most pressing issues". In its 24th year, the theme was Hungry for Change: Transcending Feast, Famine and Frenzy. As outlined by the event's organizers, "We live in an unprecedented, contradictory era. Hunger soars amid record harvests. At the same time, community-based democratic movements on every continent are showing the way toward a world without hunger. They are proving that it is possible to reconnect farming with ecological wisdom by enhancing soils and yields while empowering citizens to meet universal human needs for both food and dignity. In such a dark and disorienting time, solutions are still evident. The only real problem we have to worry about is despair arising from feelings of powerlessness. As we dig to the roots of the global crisis, we protect against despair and find our own power. Only then can we perceive how our individual and group actions can dissolve the forces that brought us here and plant the seeds of lasting solutions." Deconstructing Dinner recorded one of the event's featured speakers, Palagummi Sainath. Voices Palagummi Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor, The Hindu (Mumbai, India) - Once described by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as "one of the world's foremost experts on poverty and hunger", Palagummi Sainath is a dedicated development reporter and photojournalist. He spends the majority of his year with the village people of India's rural interior on which he reports. As the current rural affairs editor of The Hindu and author of the highly acclaimed Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts, his writing on the impacts of globalization on India's rural poor, and particularly farmer suicides, has raised public awareness and influenced both policy in India and the development debate in general. His unflinching coverage of the negative impacts of neoliberal policy on India's poorest populations has earned him over 30 awards including Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism Prize and the Raymond Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication.
Third of three sessions in which Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen speaks, followed by a brief commentary by a Stanford faculty member and questions from the audience. (April 10, 2008)
Second of three sessions in which Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen speaks, followed by a brief commentary by a Stanford faculty member and questions from the audience. (April 9, 2008)
First of three sessions in which Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen speaks, followed by a brief commentary by a Stanford faculty member and questions from the audience. (April 8, 2008)
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen explores the issue of what we want from a theory of justice.