Class Schedule for Fall 2023

The data are numbing because, in effect, we know them already. We know the problem has proven stubborn, elusive, almost biblical in its seeming intractability. Nevertheless, practitioners and scholars of development have long resisted "the poor will always be among us" fatalism, as well as the more recent fashionable explanation/excuse that the poor "fail to compete effectively" in free markets. While determined optimism has historically colored development grandiose and sometimes evangelical, there are some signs of real learning taking place. The debris fields left from the wreckage of so many 'latest and greatest' grand campaigns to eliminate global poverty (from infrastructure building, through integrated rural development, basic human needs, all the way to market empowerment) are yielding useful, incremental lessons.

This course challenge students to consider the striking inequity between the enormous range of comforts and choices in this, one of the world's most comfortable and rich societies, and the almost medieval poverty, lack of access to good housing, education, clean water, basic medicine and simple hope in most of the 'developing' or 'third' world. We will make ourselves familiar with the 'problematic' of development, explore competing conceptualizations of the issues, consider what's been tried in the past to address these issues, examine carefully what seems to work, explore major challenges facing developing societies today, and reflect on what we in the materially rich societies can do to address the problem of global, faraway (and local, nearby) poverty and underdevelopment. In doing so, the course explores development challenges in a wide range of world regions and in the historical development of the West and non-Western regions. It also introduces students to a range of tools and perspectives that have been used to make sense of chronic inequality and to offer remedies for economic stagnation.