Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Number...whatever): Successful Development

So here's a question:  What does successful development look like?  During all of my literature research in graduate school, critiques of current development paradigms brushed a number of different themes such as:  a focus on boosting capitalist economic systems only widens the rich/poor gap, changing agricultural techniques are not congruent with the environment, development aid is another form of colonialism, development programs often marginalize women, the flow of information from North to South is unequal, development isn't a linear experience (i.e. barbarism to modernism), most development is not sustainable, etc, etc...  So, what does one nation/society have to do to develop successfully?  There are some national level success stories, but why isn't Ghana one of them?  It was supposed to be--everyone thought so.  During the wave of Independence in the 50s and 60s  when most African nations gained independence from their colonial masters who were ravaged by WWII, Ghana was christened the "gem of Africa."  I'm not exactly sure why; maybe it's because Ghana is one of only a few countries with no history of civil war since independence, or because Kwame Nkrumah--Ghana's first president--was this Obama-like, messianic leader, or maybe it's gold revenue was supposed to make it prosperous?  Whatever the case, Ghana was supposed to be the big brother that showed the rest of Africa how to do it.  So why, after 50 straight years of Peace Corps (Ghana being the first PC country thanks to good ol' Kwame) are we still here?  In a recent conversation with my district's Coordinating Director, he said there is a goal to make Ghana middle-income and out of "development country" status by 2020.  An ambitious goal by any standard.  These timelines are rarely met (think of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty by half by 2000--didn't even come close), but still, it's exciting to think about.  But why could some countries get there and not others?  Places like Japan, China, Bhutan, Singapore, and South Africa "developed" in the span of a single generation.  It seems that many countries providing the aid in the development of other countries--US, Britain, Germany, China, Japan, and the UN, countries from which the finances and expertise flow from and therefore have all or most of the power--have first tried to direct development by basing it on their own histories and models.  And since these countries have mostly developed via various industrial revolutions, they have tried to replicate it in the rest of the world.

I've been thinking on this linkage I've noticed between accelerated development and rights.  In Europe and America, during our Industrial Revolutions, we were "developing" and we were worshiping at the alter of "progress" without being real sure where we were going.  And we committed a lot of human rights violations on the way.  The large factories and businesses responsible for production worked people for long hours and little pay; they privatized everything making it harder for some to afford necessary services like healthcare; they kidnapped thousands of people, sold them, and kept them in forced labor so we could have cotton, sugar, and tobacco.  And we made other sacrifices:  we scarred the Earth in irreparable ways with our pollutants and digging for riches, gave up living in communities for more private and affluent suburbs, and squeezed out productive family farms for unethical industrialized meat farms and chemicalized plants, and the list goes on.

More recently developed countries--Japan, China, Singapore--have a slightly varying version.  The difference is the rights they take away and the fact that they have a nationalized game-plan.  Their development is all top down, not in the establishment of large-scale private enterprise.  It has an amazingly organized structure and requires total obedience.  Culturally, these societies are already fit for these hierarchical development plans; they don't have the same problem with authority that Western nations do.  In one generation Japan  went from being gutted by the world's first atom bomb to the technological powerhouse it is today.  Granted it was already on it's way there before WWII, but still, that's quite a turnaround.  China had its Cultural Revolution which brought Communism, and Singapore had it's own Cultural Minister.  These countries' governments came up with a plan and demanded complete obedience to them.  Right to free speech or dissent was the first thing to go, next the freedom from Big Government and too many Thou Shalt Not rules, then the right to choose many important things in your life: the number of your children, the career or your choosing, your residence, etc.  Then come the other sacrifices:  traditional customs are devalued and eliminated, rituals are lost, languages go extinct, and lifestyles change.  Japan lost the noble samurai, teahouses and geishas; China lost a lot of music and art.  Grandparents grew up in villages, grandchildren in cities.  It's like countries have growing pains (South African apartheid example?).  The pattern seems to be that in order for desired development to occur, a whole generation has to be sacrificed--have their rights taken away and work doubly hard so their children see the benefit, not them--and be on board with it before their children start squawking about growing up in repressive regimes.  Is that what's happening in Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria right now?  Discuss.

Next on this vein:  Bhutan and the idea of Gross National Happiness as a legitimate measure of development. I also have one about gender (finally).