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From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics
This book, now available in English for the first time, has become a classic since it was first published in 1982. Translated into five languages, it has had an extraordinary influence on grassroots development projects.
The author relates two of his own experiences in 'barefoot economics', interspersing these moving and insightful accounts with reflections on development projects and experts, pioneering criticism of of orthodox development economics, and a new vision of development in which the poor must learn to circumvent the national economic system.
The author relates two of his own experiences in 'barefoot economics', interspersing these moving and insightful accounts with reflections on development projects and experts, pioneering criticism of of orthodox development economics, and a new vision of development in which the poor must learn to circumvent the national economic system.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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September 8, 2016Artur Manfred Max-Neef, a Chilean of German descent and former UC Berkeley economics professor - who one imagines is something of a perennial outsider - recounts his crisis of faith in conventional economics through his experience as an advisor on development projects in Ecuador and Brazil. What he sees is the tragedy of multidimensional poverty perpetuated by ill fitting policies imposed by well meaning Western governments, exacerbated by the ecological crisis created by not so well meaning Western capitalists intent on total resource extraction in the developing world. It is classical north-south divide stuff, except that he is writing in the early 1980s.
His view of economics - he calls it human scale development - owes a great deal to EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful.
His telling of the human challenges in development do not add much to a story that was explained in a mass of case studies by EM Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations.
The tragic stories of native Indian civilizations collapsing and the slow erosion of their traditional habitat was related much earlier in Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, aspects of which are reprised in Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything.
Although it lacks originality, when treated as a primer to his later work on human needs one gains insight into why he came to write the later text Human Scale Development, which for now is not nearly as widely read or as celebrated as it ought to be. This will change when a bigger audience becomes familiar with his work, which has the potential to make Abraham Maslow's ideas on needs entirely redundant.
His view of economics - he calls it human scale development - owes a great deal to EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful.
His telling of the human challenges in development do not add much to a story that was explained in a mass of case studies by EM Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations.
The tragic stories of native Indian civilizations collapsing and the slow erosion of their traditional habitat was related much earlier in Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, aspects of which are reprised in Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything.
Although it lacks originality, when treated as a primer to his later work on human needs one gains insight into why he came to write the later text Human Scale Development, which for now is not nearly as widely read or as celebrated as it ought to be. This will change when a bigger audience becomes familiar with his work, which has the potential to make Abraham Maslow's ideas on needs entirely redundant.
April 15, 2024
i am now an economist. please reach out for financial advice.
March 28, 2017
E.F. Schumacher was a visionary ‘green economist’ way ahead of his time when it came to the environmental consequences of capitalism. Another man way ahead of his time was the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who in 1981, at the request of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, wrote From The Outside Looking In: Experiences In Barefoot Economics.
In the telling and personal introduction to this book, Max-Neef describes his increasing disillusion with economics, which he could see was losing what small amount of humane philosophy it had begun with. He withdrew from the field to begin work on what E.F. Schumacher called “economics as if people mattered.”
In the small theoretical section of the book Max-Neef identifies four major problems: our obsession with giantism and ‘big solutions’; our mechanistic approach to solving economic problems, which anyway never relate to people but to issues of production and efficiency; our obsession with abstract, measurable quantities; and a tendency to oversimplify, and thus ignore the real complexities of human life.
The book is roughly split into two, with the first main section dealing with the lives of poor or deprived people in coastal Ecuador, and the second concerning artisans in Brazil. In both cases though the intention is to display the dependency of these people on big government, big social care and big organisations. Max-Neef’s ultimate goal was to make the people “invisible,” to use his term, by which he meant independent – invisible to the huge, uncaring, computational machines of capitalism. This could only be done on the community scale – the humane scale.
Alongside Schumacher’s classic 'Small Is Beautiful' this book was my first introduction to the damage capitalism and ‘big society’ was doing both to the planet and to communities. Max-Neef is alas not so well known as Schumacher, but he had just as much to say; and every word of it is relevant today.
In the telling and personal introduction to this book, Max-Neef describes his increasing disillusion with economics, which he could see was losing what small amount of humane philosophy it had begun with. He withdrew from the field to begin work on what E.F. Schumacher called “economics as if people mattered.”
In the small theoretical section of the book Max-Neef identifies four major problems: our obsession with giantism and ‘big solutions’; our mechanistic approach to solving economic problems, which anyway never relate to people but to issues of production and efficiency; our obsession with abstract, measurable quantities; and a tendency to oversimplify, and thus ignore the real complexities of human life.
The book is roughly split into two, with the first main section dealing with the lives of poor or deprived people in coastal Ecuador, and the second concerning artisans in Brazil. In both cases though the intention is to display the dependency of these people on big government, big social care and big organisations. Max-Neef’s ultimate goal was to make the people “invisible,” to use his term, by which he meant independent – invisible to the huge, uncaring, computational machines of capitalism. This could only be done on the community scale – the humane scale.
Alongside Schumacher’s classic 'Small Is Beautiful' this book was my first introduction to the damage capitalism and ‘big society’ was doing both to the planet and to communities. Max-Neef is alas not so well known as Schumacher, but he had just as much to say; and every word of it is relevant today.
February 15, 2016
Enjoyable, easy to read, and very quotable!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews