politically, socially, spiritually, psychologically and culturally. We must be
fully developed in terms of national unity and social cohesion, in terms of
our economy, in terms of social justice, political stability, system of govern-
ment, quality of life, social and spiritual values, national pride and confi-
dence. (Vision 2020)This is quite typical. The ideal end-state is rarely seen in terms of higher
incomes alone. Many scholars, visionaries and philosophers have defined their
vision of an ideal society, so progress can be seen and measured as movement
towards that end-state. Many have drawn from writings in the Bible, the Koran
and other holy books and been inspired to create a religiously ordained ideal
state on earth. Examples include the Christian Puritan communities in eigh-
teenth-century America, contemporary arguments among some groups for an
Islamic Caliphate, and Hindu Ram-Raja in India. It is not easy to distinguish
between a genuine belief that a particular social order has divine sanction and
the self-interested motives of rulers seeking to legitimize their own rule by
appealing for divine support. Did seventeenth-century European kings really
believe they were ‘God’s appointed rulers’? Karl Marx in the nineteenth
century argued that the ideal end-state was communism, which he defined as a
situation when resources were distributed ‘from each according to his ability
to each according to his need’. Marx saw development as proceeding through
a series of stages of social organization (what he called ‘modes of production’)
from hunter-gatherer, to slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and finally
communism. Each stage gav e way to the next, usually after a revolution, and
each was progressive in that it represented a higher standard of material and
cultural life than the preceding stage, laying the foundations for progress to the
next stage. Marxists have tried to measure progress through this series of end-
states by documenting the emergence of social classes and divisions between
classes, trade union organization and the growth of revolutionary political
parties. The US government in more recent years has changed its perspective
on ‘development’: whereas previously poverty was a central concern, the goal
today is to create a liberal free-market democracy. This can help explain why
the US has expended such vast resources promoting democracy in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
One of the most practical and influential visions has been that of ‘basic
needs’, associated with the work of Dudley Seers, Paul Streeten, Irma
Adelman and Cynthia Morris in the 1970s. This approach argues that develop-
ment should be less concerned with average incomes than with achieving
universal access to a basket of goods and services including food, clothing,
housing, education and public transportation.
There are conceptual problems with this approach. Who is to determine
what constitutes those basic needs? Basic needs can be (and often are) meas-
ured as the income necessary for a household to purchase this basket of goods
and services, and those with lower incomes than this cut-off counted as being
in poverty. Should basic needs be considered as the actual consumption by
32 Sources of Growth in the Modern World Economy since 1950