fatvegan

After my two development subjects last year, I was convinced that the course was going to approach the topic with some sensitivity. All we talked about was imperialism and cultural subjectivity and the failures of classical economics.

This year, we've learnt that development is painful but has to happen. It requires major and rapid changes to local culture to permit real economic change to occur. It requires massive investment from outside the country. It requires bottom-up change not top-down change.

Yesterday our case studies were about how to encourage development in Egypt when neither the government nor the people affected want it. And how to encourage/force Ukraine to solve problems of employer discrimination that the West is only just starting to solve.

The subject is totally capitalist (in the Arts Faculty?!). It criticises trivial problems with capitalism while swallowing the rest of it merrily.

It's made worse by the fact that the person in charge of the subject, is also in charge of my other social science subject. He seems like a nice guy, but I disagree with almost everything he says. He doesn't seem to have the first clue about economics. Apparently the gini coefficient is the distance between a 45% degree line and some arbitrary point on the regression line of a lot of income observations plotted against time. Purchasing power parity is when economists try to add non-GDP wealth onto GDP wealth. And one of the golden rules; the economy has to grow at 3% a year or you'll get unemployment. More than 3% and unemployment drops.

There are these broken macroeconomic models which are used to show that unions and full employment create inflation. The reason they're broken is because neither of those things actually do seem to cause inflation. When these models agree with his ideology then they're fine, but when they disagree then they're terrible tools used by evil capitalists (as opposed to nice fluffy ones) to justify their evil plans for world domination.

Fortunately we never go "into the technical detail."