Third, in the late 1950s there was deep unease in the developed world. Two
of its leading military powers (Britain and France) had just been humiliated in
a failed military intervention in Egypt, the ‘Suez Crisis’ (there are evident
parallels with contemporary Iraq). The USSR had beaten the US in the race to
launch a satellite into orbit and for many this symbolized an industrial and
economic threat to the US. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev then
proclaimed to the US ‘We will bury you’, many feared this could be true (for a
parallel situation, see contemporary China, whose leaders are openly contemp-
tuous of the Western democratic model).
Economic growth is not everything
There is economic growth – the main focus of this book – but there is also
development, and the two need not coincide. It is true that whether an economy
is growing and expanding is the most widely accepted and potent symbol of
economic success. Economic growth and its accumulated impact on average
income defines whether a country is eligible to join the club for the wealthy,
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), or is
side-lined at international meetings and treated as an impoverished supplicant.
How we think about the contemporary world is heavily conditioned by
economic growth. The lack of economic growth is what most commonly is
used to define and measure the ‘failure’ of Sub-Saharan Africa over the
decades since independence. The growth rates of 8 per cent+ define the ‘mira-
cle economy’ stories of Japan in the 1950s,South Korea in the 1970s, Thailand
in the 1980s and China in the 1990s. Growth rates since 2008 have been used
to judge the success or failure of countries across Europe in coping with the
global financial crisis.
There are a number of well-known problems in using growth in average
incomes as a measure of well-being. The benefits of economic growth may be
monopolized by a small fraction of the population. Despite steady, if not spec-
tacular growth in average incomes in the US between 1973 and 2010, the aver-
age incomes of the bottom 99 per cent of the population actually fell. All that
growth and more went to benefit the top 1 per cent of the population. Income
growth again says nothing about what is being produced, whether it is guns or
medical treatments. Higher incomes may reflect longer and more intensive
working hours, unsustainable exploitation of the environment or the accumu-
lation of debt.
The concept of ‘development’ must incorporate some consideration or meas-
ure of ‘better’. Better is ultimately a value judgment, comparing two states and
judging that development has occurred if one is better than the other. Many
measures of development have been used by scholars, including education, clean
water, shelter, political freedoms and nutrition. If economic growth involves the
poor experiencing income growth (not always true as the US example showed)
and if poor people choose to spend increasing incomes on those measures then
we can say that economic growth leads to development. The state may also
12 Introduction