Thursday, March 19, 2009
An interesting group discussion topic
Now that we are more than halfway through the semester, which is pretty hard to believe, I am curious as to everyone's opinions about what they have learned throughout our studies of different development models, practices, and outcomes all over the world. It would be great to hear what your opinions were before and whether they have remained the same or changed over the course of the semester. Do you have any different opinions of how the U.S. should act towards other countries in terms of development now? Is there one specific model that strikes you as the most wholesome and balanced, or do you think there are bits from many theories that would work harmoniously together? Will what you have learned in our class change your pursuits in international development in the future? Hopefully we can talk about this in class because I would love to know where everyone stands with the wealth of history, practices, and examples to which we have been exposed.
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I think this is a very interesting discussion topic indeed! We will have time to talk about this on the last 2 days of class, but I definitely think that it is something that should be talked about more.
I know that my views have changed a lot, particularly to being more respectful of different approaches. You learn very quickly that you don't have all the answers and that this whole field is very, very tricky. Indeed, I think that the biggest problem we've seen is that the "discourse" has believed that they had all the answers. This is a very vague way of saying that we've believed that the key to development has been economic growth, which is not the case.
I've recently studied Amartya Sen deeply and I agree with his fundamental idea of viewing Development as Freedom. Once we understand that economic growth is a means, rather than an end, the whole perspective changes. Where I have changed particularly has been in understanding that we're transitioning from seeing development as growth to a more nuanced view. I think we're still figuring it out though, which is exciting, because it means that we will all play an important role in determining where we go form here.
Does that make sense?
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