By John Denlay
Language, according to Chilean economist Professor Manfred Max-Neef, is the mould within which human societies operate. Language is the means by which we describe our perceptions of the world, and our perceptions strongly influence our behaviour.
It was on this all-pervasive influence of language that Max-Neef based his Sydney talk during his recent Australian tour.
Max-Neef is the founder and executive director of the Development Alternatives Centre in Chile. He has held many distinguished academic, government and United Nations positions since the 1960s and was awarded the Right Livelihood Award by the Swedish parliament (described as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1983.
His colleagues dubbed him the "barefoot economist" due to his preference for leaving behind the economic models to be with and understand the people who have been marginalised by the one-sided Western economics now dominating the world.
Max-Neef opened his talk with an overwhelmingly convincing set of indicators of global ecological, human and economic crises.
Global warming, ozone layer depletion and soil erosion all threaten the planet's fragile ecology. For example, an area of fertile land larger than India and China combined has been lost to soil erosion or chemical contamination.
One child in three is malnourished, 1.5 billion people do not have access to fresh water, and just 6% of people receive 50% of world income.
The roots of these problems, Max-Neef reminds us, are unlimited growth and the over-consumption of the rich.
The popular solution, at least in mainstream economics, is sustained economic growth, globalisation of the world economy and international assistance for poorer countries. To Max-Neef, these are the very acts that compound the problems.
How can it be that such catastrophic solutions can still be advocated?
Max-Neef believes the inappropriateness of our language provides part of the answer. The simplistic, catechistic and dogmatic economically dominated language of the 20th century may have had some relevance up to the 1960s, but today is totally at odds with our true needs.
The language of the 1920s and 30s, dominated by the Keynesian model of government intervention and deficit spending, matched the needs of that period of depression and crisis.
Even the optimistic language of the 1950s and '60s was coherent with the challenges of the day.
With the 1970s and 80s came environmental degradation and poverty obvious to all who bothered to look. Yet the necessary shift in language, says Max-Neef, did not occur. This has left a total incoherence between the problems we face and our language.
In his presentation, Max-Neef discussed a number of phrases of the 1950s and 60s that still are followed blindly by mainstream economics.
Growth: Max-Neef challenges the pursuit of indiscriminate growth by distinguishing between growth — a quantitative measure; and development — a measure of quality. He notes that every living system grows to a point and from there on it develops, with the only exception being the cancer cell.
Free Trade: If trade is good, then free trade must be better, and an agreement for free trade must be best! Max-Neef uses the recently signed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to expose the shallowness of this thinking.
NAFTA was created by US President Bush to serve, not the people of North America, but the US transnational corporations (TNCs). The agreement opens the way for giants like Du Pont, Exxon and Dow Chemicals to establish in Mexico to take advantage of cheap labour and lower environmental standards.
Like other free trade agreements, NAFTA works to standardise laws. A NAFTA tribunal decides if a country's regulations act against free trade. Thus qualitative legislation (such as pollution control laws) formed by a country's democratic process can be dismantled under the name of free trade.
Globalisation: Max-Neef believes that all economists would agree that governments should intervene to correct market imperfections within their borders. The rise of TNCs means the market has broken national borders and become global — yet no global government structure has emerged to respond to the failings in this global market.
Without such control, the TNCs are in a position where intelligent behaviour is irresponsible behaviour, such as polluting.
The TNCs have moved beyond being just monopolies or oligopolies. They now call the shots. Countries compete to attract the TNCs to their shores — and this is often done by offering lower environmental standards and working conditions.
Max-Neef was at his most profound when discussing poverty. He again used a metaphor: "You can study everything possible about love, but you will never understand it until you fall in love. We economists know everything about poverty — where it is, how intense and so on. If it's growing, it's not because we don't know about it, but because we don't understand it."
Manfred Max-Neef displays extraordinary insights into many of today's most fundamental problems. We need him and others like him to keep reminding us of the urgent need to develop a new way of viewing economics, including a new language and a shift from knowing to understanding. [John Denlay is a freelance writer and campaigner with Friends of the Earth.]