Growth as an assumption of progress
How do we make value judgements about whether things have got better over
time? In particular how do we make a judgement if some things have got better
and some things have got worse? The most explicit notion of economic growth
as progress comes from the modernization school of development. In
economic terms modernization implies industrialization and urbanization and
the technological transformation of agriculture. In social terms it involves the
weakening of traditional ties and the rise of achievement (rather than factors
based on birth such as caste or kin) as the basis for personal advancement.
Culturally modernization is represented by the decline of religion and
increased secularization of society arising from the spread of scientific knowl-
edge. One of the most influential models of modernization came from Rostow
(1960) who argued that there were five stages of economic growth. These were
in turn the ‘traditional society’, ‘preconditions for takeoff’, ‘takeoff’, the
‘drive to maturity’, and the ‘age of mass consumption’. Takeoff required that
society be prepared to respond actively to new possibilities for productive
enterprise, which argued Rostow was likely to require political, social and
institutional changes in response to economic change and innovation. An
example has been the cultural acceptance of young women working outside
the household in response to increasing job opportunities in textile factories.
The beginning of the takeoff could usually be traced to a sharp jolt such as a
political or technological revolution. Karl Marx was also a modernist and
argued that history progressed through stages from slavery to communism.
Modernization has often been criticized as a historical description of economic
and social change in North America and Western Europe in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, wrongly heralded as a universally applicable process
(Ingham, 1993). Recent historical experience shows that it is wrong to assume
modernization and education necessarily lead to secularism. In the Middle
East urbanization and the growth of a literate middle class have accompanied
the resurgent influence of Islam, not secularism. It is also naive to assume that
local or indigenous alternatives must be good. Many such alternatives have
simply reflected the interests of a brutal minority. The Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia promised to build an agricultural paradise free of foreign influence
in the early 1970s and murdered millions in the process. Opposition to
modernization often comes from those who had benefited from the violence
and repression and exploitative structures and institutions of traditional soci-
eties (Ingham,1993).
Human history has not always been about a linear process of improvement
or the decline of the traditional and rise of the modern. The collapse of the
Roman Empire in the fifth century led to a collapse of long-distance trade and
urbanization and resulted in a massive decline in income levels in Western and
Southern Europe that were not achieved again for perhaps a thousand years.
In the 1930s liberal, democratic and prosperous Germany lurched into the
brutal and totalitarian Nazi dictatorship. There never have been unambiguous
Thinking about Growth 39