This month, as I have continued thinking about how our values shape economic policy, I am reminded of a statement shared with me by Brunswick’s Economic and Community Development Director, Travis Stegall.
He said, and I paraphrase, there are two types of development economists: those who focus on money, and those who focus on people.
I remember how shocked and disappointed I was when I stepped out of graduate school and into “the real world” and discovered how many fall into the former category.
I had recently come home from my third trip to West Africa, and I had just completed a dissertation wholly focused on improving lives of individuals and communities who had experienced conflict. I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to change the world with what I had learned.
But then I started talking with others about local development in the U.S. and Canada, and I started noticing a disturbing theme. To many here in the developed world, economic development is all about attracting and keeping businesses and raising Gross Regional Product (GRP).
Business development and GRP are certainly a large part of economic development, but they should never be the sole focus of a development plan. When development becomes synonymous with improving GRP, we miss the point entirely.
In Chapter 6 of their book Essentials of Development Economics, Edward Taylor and Travis Lybbert assert that income is but a means to an end. A region’s true level of development is measured not in production or income but in its residents’ quality of life. Income certainly contributes to quality of life but does not define it.
In the 1990s, the U.N. Development Program established the Human Development Index (HDI), a numerical measure of how well-developed a nation or region is.
The HDI is calculated using four proxies for quality of life: life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling for children, average years of schooling for adults, and gross national/regional income per capita.
Truly developed economies are economies in which people have access to quality health care and education and are therefore free to make choices that both productive and fulfilling.
Free. There’s the key word. Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen described economic development as just that — freedom.
When we value individual freedom over money, it changes how we do economic development. We start to see plans to develop humans rather than industries. Education and health care are no longer simply footnotes in the workforce development chapter of our strategy to attract firms.
We educate and train individuals because quality education expands one’s career options and extends his or her freedom to choose.
We ensure top notch health care so men and women are free to provide for themselves and their families without the physical, emotional, and financial burdens of sickness.
And when we develop these communities where individuals are free to pursue happiness and emotional and financial stability for themselves and their families, I suspect we will find these are exactly the communities in which businesses thrive and GRP soars.
Reg Murphy Center