In the Footsteps of a Barefoot Economist:
My debt of gratitude to Manfred Max-Neef
This is a lightly updated chapter from my 2015 book The Promise of Justice: King Justice Mpondombini Sigcau’s struggle to save the kingdom of the Mpondo from unjust developments”. It is republished in support of protest action against plans by Shell Oil to do seismic testing for oil and gas exploration along the Mpondoland Wild Coast by means of air blasting and sonic wave mapping of the earths crust beneath the ocean floor.
Manfred Max-Neef started his career as a promising young executive in Shell Oil in Chile, some sixty years ago. In this chapter I narrate his story of why he left Shell Oil to embark on an entirely different career path which led him to become a “barefoot economist”.
He passed to eternity on 8th August 2019.
If we leave enough places in the world:
where silence is not broken with our noises,
where space is not altered with our objects,
where evolution is not interrupted with our progresses,
where misery is not consolidated because of our greeds,
we will be worthy of being part of the shared miracle of life.
Manfred Max-Neef. New year greeting card. 1997.
The Gordon Institute of Business Science prides itself on being the premier Business School in South Africa. The venue was packed with an interesting assortment of radical NGO types, suited business executives, and even some government officials who had all come to hear what the elegant professor from Valdivia, Chile, had to say.
It was April 2006. Another decade has passed since the publication of his inspirational book Human Scale Development. It was my turn to host Manfred in South Africa. The decade just passed had not erased my experience of Valdivia’s Black-necked Swans, for I had received a Christmas card in December 1999, three years after my visit to Valdivia. It pictured a pair of black-necked swans swimming among the reeds of the Cruces River, with four newly hatched cygnets.
Manfred’s message read:
Because we have reached a stage in our human evolution where we know a lot yet understand very little, we have brought into being the most destructive generations of humankind.
Let us, therefore, firmly hope for this year to become the transition from a century of knowledge to a century of understanding.
Very best wishes, happiness, creativity and, above all, understanding, to you and your loved ones.
Manfred.
Smug with the self-satisfaction of having succeeded at short notice to fill a conventional business school auditorium with an unconventional economist, I sat back to listen to him and watch the audience’s reaction.
He opened by confessing that he was not a practising businessman and admitted, ‘I was one. I entered the university very young. I was only sixteen and graduated when I was twenty’.
As a young, intelligent, bachelor with obvious leadership qualities, the multinational company, Shell Oil, had recruited him soon after graduating. He embarked on a career trajectory that would have taken him all the way to international Vice President of the company. He imagined himself one day, ‘negotiating oil deals with the Shah of Iran. The sky was the limit!’
He then explained that before he graduated as an economist his first love had been classical music. He was an accomplished pianist and composer and Johannes Brahms was one of his favourite composers.
‘After five very successful years working as a young international executive for Shell Oil, while listening to music on my brand new state-of-the-art Hi-Fi, something very strange happened to me. I was listening to a performance of Brahms’s first symphony with Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. I was sitting in a comfortable chair, sipping an expensive cognac, relaxing, when Brahms spoke to me … in German of course!’
The audience laughed, warming to the commanding presence of the eccentric bearded giant.
‘It was at the start of the slow second movement. A beautiful piece …’ — he hummed the gentle melody.
‘I could hear his voice singing ‘Was machst du mit dem Leben?’ (what are you doing with life?). He repeated it again, four times. I then visualised myself, sitting in the same chair, sipping the same cognac, listening to the same symphony, with one important difference. I imagined myself an old man, looking back on his life and career, as an international executive in the oil industry, now answering his question. I realised this life was not for me.’
Two days later Manfred flew to the company headquarters and resigned.
‘Of course I couldn’t explain why I was leaving such a promising career. They would have committed me to a mental hospital because it made no sense. I did not know what I was going to do yet. I returned to university to do my Ph.D.’
In due course he found that the language of development economics being taught in universities was becoming increasingly incoherent with the reality of people living in poverty.
‘Someone nicknamed me “a barefoot economist”. It was not me who came up with the term, but I thought “what can I say to a man — if I am standing next to him, a man living in poverty, with no shoes, unemployed, with a family to provide for, living in a slum — that could be of help to him.” I realised the language of economics I had been taught had precisely nothing to say that could be of help to that man. So I started work on pruning the language of economics. Pruning lets in more light. And gradually I began to develop a language that was coherent with the reality of poverty. It was not a matter of gaining more knowledge. It was about developing an understanding. Knowledge and understanding are not the same thing.’
Manfred’s lengthy presentation flew by. The rapt attention of the audience hardly wavered as he systematically worked though the six principles of what he now calls, ‘a trans-disciplinary economics for sustainability’.
To illustrate his arguments he focused on Ireland, claimed by conventional economists as one of the ‘modern economic success stories’. But Manfred showed a shocking divergence between the crude quantitative measures of economic success from the dominant conventional neo-liberal perspective, compared with measures focused on the quality of life of the greater majority of Irish citizens.
The audience was riveted by his presentation but the sense of smug satisfaction warming my inner being immediately vanished when Manfred illustrated the final principle.
‘Under no circumstances whatsoever can any economic process or interest be above the reverence for life.’
His tone of voice was serious. He put up a picture of a group of black-necked swans, the iconic species of his home city, swimming contentedly in the Cruces River in the Anwandter Nature Reserve in Valdivia.
He explained that Valdivia, proportioned on a human scale, is a city where 150,000 residents live surrounded by five rivers that together form a nature reserve, boasting the largest population in the world of black-necked swans.
‘It is an absolute paradise,’ he said, with emphasis. ‘These beautiful creatures occur only in that part of the world. The normal population is about 6,000 to 8,000 birds, which along with many other water birds, makes it a tourist attraction not to be missed. It is a wetland which is listed by RAMSAR as a reserve, which the Chilean government is obliged to protect.’
Anger began to mark his words. ‘Well, I invite you to go there now, and you will find that not a single swan is left. All that paradise has become a water desert. Why?’
As he paused, a sense of horror began to well up inside me.
‘Because economic interests dictated that, for the sake of economic growth, to create jobs, etc., a massive pulp mill must be constructed upstream — which simply threw its shit into the river. Within six months the wetland was destroyed.’
Horrified murmurs arose from the audience as he continued.
‘The pulp mill, supposedly an economic investment of $1,500 million to create employment in the area, has given menial work to perhaps ten unemployed local people. The other 200 employees are all from elsewhere, and are sufficiently skilled to get jobs in other big investment projects,’ he told us. Not only had this devastated one of South America’s most biologically outstanding wetlands, decimating its famed population of black-necked swans along with most other birdlife, but the health of the human population has also been affected. Ominously, the indigenous Mapuche people of Chile were demoralised by the consequent collapse of the local tourism industry, which had provided employment and self-esteem.
‘We were threatened, lied to, and assured that such a catastrophe could never happen. We, a group of scientists from my university, had opposed the proposed development. We went to court but the Supreme Court found against us — because of a report produced by the developers, which included the names of many eminent scientists. After the tragedy, it emerged that most of the scientists had never been consulted. Their names were used without their knowledge and consent. They lied to the Supreme Court!’
Venting his anger he went on, ‘But what was their argument? Development! “Don’t you want Valdivia to develop?” they said to us, “don’t you see what this means? This is an investment of $1,500 million for God’s sake … can’t you see that … don’t be so stupid!” Employment! Jobs!’
As he continued, the abstract caricature he was sketching began to sound more and more familiar.
‘Those arguments didn’t impress me in the least,’ Manfred responded to his abstract adversary. ‘If, instead of an investment of $1,500 million in one project you invest in 1,500 projects by giving them $1 million each, that will impress me. I have seen and heard the arguments for mega projects all over the world, but I have seldom, if indeed ever, seen a mega project that has proved beneficial to local people and the place where that project is located.’
Indeed, he is widely travelled and speaks seven languages, besides the universal language of music. Manfred had moved on from the slow, soulful, First Symphony of Brahms; instead, the thunderous, angry cadences of the Tragic Overture now pealed forth, provoking volcanic eruptions of anger within me.
‘Beneficial — yes — to the national economy in terms of export earnings,’ Manfred continued, ‘beneficial to the macro economy — yes — in terms of GDP. But hardly ever is it beneficial to the people who are affected. In practice it is almost always the opposite of this principle.’
Under no circumstances whatsoever can any economic process or interest be above the reverence for life.
‘I have never found anyone who disagrees with this in theory. But in practice, over and over again, the exact opposite happens.’
Nobody among the audience disagreed with the soundness of the principle; neither did anyone offer evidence to show that a mega project has in fact proved locally beneficial.
‘Some might argue that this is the inevitable cost of progress. But progress surely means that circumstances are better than before. How can any sane person call this progress?’ he challenged.
Darwin’s ‘strange sense of insecurity’ does not even begin to capture how I felt. This was no natural disaster, unfortunate for some in the short term, but beneficial for Life in the long term. This was no tectonic shift to open up a new stream of consciousness and shift the paradigm of understanding how nature works. This was a manmade environmental catastrophe.
The absurd economic rationale applied in Chile and parodied by Manfred had an exact parallel in South Africa. Expensive full page ‘advertorials’ had appeared in all major newspapers in early 2004, to market the N2 Wild Coast Toll Road. Nazir Alli, Chief Executive Officer of SANRAL, had spent millions to justify his R2 billion mega project to, “uplift the local residents’’ — by constructing a new high speed motorway along the Wild Coast.
There was one important difference: The “progress” on offer to residents of the Wild Coast still had to pass the required Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). At the same time, while SANRAL’s massive marketing campaign had failed to acquire popular support for the motorway, Mr Alli had shown no signs of giving up — he was determined that it would prevail.
I needed to console both Manfred and myself, and to create some meaning from the looming catastrophe. Accordingly, I pledged to make an absolute and irrevocable commitment to offer my modest professional abilities and efforts to ensure that the N2 Wild Coast mega development did not lead to an outcome similar to that in Valdivia: life subordinated to the economics of greed rather than need.
I was completely unsure how I would fulfil this pledge, but the time had come to test the bold assertion of Scottish mountaineer, William Murray:
‘Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.’[2]
[1]http://www.ramsar.org/cda/en/ramsar-about-sites/main/ramsar/1-36-55_4000_0__
[2] W.H. Murray in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951. Often erroneously attributed to Goethe because it resonates with other passages he wrote.
