Development-Hindering Issues of Mass Unemployment and Mass Migration Explained: Poverty, the Cause; Education, the Solution

In his 1973 book titled Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered published in London by Blond & Briggs Ltd available here, precisely in this book’s Chapter Eleven titled Development featuring on pp.118-124, E. F. Schumacher pertinently observes that two phenomena are getting a great concern throughout the world nowadays, namely: (i) Mass Unemployment; and (ii) Mass Migration from rural areas into cities. Mass Unemployment particularly leads to Mass Migration in many countries in the world, but one may add that the same also happens in the cases of migration from the [Global] South (underdeveloped countries) to the [Global] North (developed countries).

According to author E. F. Schumacher, both phenomena of Mass Unemployment and Mass Migration are explained by a number of factors he mentions in his above-evoked book the key of which are the following four (04):

(1) The way countries’ GDP in general and the aid given to underdeveloped countries in particular are used to improve the lives of the beneficiaries.

(2) The fact that there is a worldwide pervasive development pattern of ‘dual economy’ in the sense the expression was given by Boeke who created it in 1953 (Singer: 1988, p.95).

• In actual fact, the sense of the expression ‘dual economy’ is ??the coexistence of modern and traditional sectors in a colonial economy. Today the term dual (or more frequently dualistic) economy is applied more broadly to the coexistence of rich and poor sectors (either rich and poor countries in the global economy or rich and poor people in the national economy), where there is often a tendency for the ‘rich to become richer, while the poor remain poor or become poorer’??.
• This development pattern of ‘dual economy’ is what is otherwise currently known as ‘the rural-urban divide’ when individual countries are concerned (e.g. the case of the US in general and of the North Carolina state in particular; or the case of India), or else ‘the [Global] North-South divide’ (see here) when the whole world is considered in the broader context of globalization.
• In the perspective of the development pattern of ‘dual economy’, Grosfoguel (2000, p.360) on his part is of the view that “Development and underdevelopment are produced by the center-periphery relationships of the capitalist world-system”, whereas Chirot & Hall (1982, p.85) even introduce a third category between “the core” or the center and “the periphery”, namely “the semiperiphery” which they report Wallerstein describes it as follows: ??Societies in this group [i.e. the semiperiphery] stand between the core and periphery in terms of economic power. Some may eventually fall into the periphery, as did Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries, and others may eventually rise into the core, as has modem Japan. Semiperipheries deflect the anger and revolutionary activity of peripheries, and they serve as good places for capitalist investment when well-organized labor forces in core economies cause wages to rise too fast??.
• This development pattern of ‘dual economy’ is what Grosfoguel (2000, p.360) expresses through the phrase that “development and underdevelopment constituted each other through a relational process”.

(3) The ‘idolatry of gigantism’ in general, and as far as cities are concerned in particular, with the cities of London, Tokyo and New York being given as examples (see Schumacher: 1973, pp.45-46).

(4) The high level of development achieved in the technology of communication and transportation E. F. Schumacher describes as follows:

“A highly developed transport and communications system has one immensely powerful effect: it makes people footloose. Millions of people start moving about, deserting the rural areas and the smaller towns to follow the city lights, to go to the big city, causing a pathological growth. Take the country in which all this is perhaps most exemplified — the United States. Sociologists are studying the problem of ‘megalopolis’. The word ‘metropolis’ is no longer big enough; hence ‘megalopolis’. They freely talk about the polarisation of the population of the United States into three immense megalopolitan areas: one extending from Boston to Washington, a continuous built-up area, with sixty million people; one around Chicago, another sixty million; and one on the West Coast from San Francisco to San Diego, again a continuous built-up area with sixty million people; the rest of the country being left practically empty; deserted provincial towns, and the land cultivated with vast tractors, combine harvesters, and immense amounts of chemicals. […] Whether we like it or not, this is the result of people having become footloose; it is the result of that marvellous mobility of labour which economists treasure above all else” (Schumacher: 1973, p.47).

In the final analysis of the whole point being made in this explanation, the following quote from Schumacher (1973, pp.121-122) seems to be adequately appropriate for the Mass Unemployment and Mass Migration occurring not only between within-country “cities” but also between “developing countries” and “developed countries” — provided that, in the latter case whereby we also want to accommodate the global context, we replace “cities” in relevant places where the word is written in the quote by the expression “developed countries”:

??Until recently, the development experts rarely referred to the dual economy and its twin evils of mass unemployment and mass migration into cities. When they did so, they merely deplored them and treated them as transitional. Meanwhile, it has become widely recognised that time alone will not be the healer. On the contrary, the dual economy, unless consciously counteracted, produces what I have called a ‘process of mutual poisoning’, whereby successful industrial development in the cities destroys the economic structure of the hinterland, and the hinterland takes its revenge by mass migration into the cities, poisoning them and making them utterly unmanageable. Forward estimates made by the World Health Organisation and by experts like Kingsley Davies predict cities of twenty, forty, and even sixty million inhabitants, a prospect of ‘immiseration’ for multitudes of people that beggars the imagination.

Is there an alternative? That the developing countries cannot do without a modern sector, particularly where they are in direct contact with the rich countries, is hardly open to doubt. What needs to be questioned is the implicit assumption that the modern sector can be expanded to absorb virtually the entire population and that this can be done fairly quickly. The ruling philosophy of development over the last twenty years has been: ‘What is best for the rich must be best for the poor’. This belief has been carried to truly astonishing lengths, as can be seen by inspecting the list of developing countries in which the Americans and their allies and in some cases also the Russians have found it necessary and wise to establish ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactors — Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Portugal, Venezuela — all of them countries whose overwhelming problems are agriculture and the rejuvenation of rural life, since the great majority of their poverty-stricken peoples live in rural areas.

The starting point of all our considerations is poverty, or rather, a degree of poverty which means misery[1], and degrades and stultifies the human person: and our first task is to recognise and understand the boundaries and limitations which this degree of poverty imposes. Again, our crudely materialistic philosophy makes us liable to see only ‘the material opportunities’ (to use the words of the White Paper which I have already quoted) and to overlook the immaterial factors. Among the causes of poverty, I am sure, the material factors are entirely secondary — such things as a lack of natural wealth, or a lack of capital, or an insufficiency of infrastructure. The primary causes of extreme poverty are immaterial, they lie in certain deficiencies in education, organisation, and discipline.

Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organisation, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped potential. There are prosperous societies with but the scantiest basis of natural wealth, and we have had plenty of opportunity to observe the primacy of the invisible factors after the war. Every country, no matter how devastated, which had a high level of education, organisation, and discipline, produced an ‘economic miracle’. In fact these were miracles only for people whose attention is focused on the tip of the iceberg. The tip had been smashed to pieces, but the base, which is education, organisation, and discipline, was still there.

Here, then lies the central problem of development. If the primary causes of poverty are deficiencies in these three respects, then the alleviation of poverty depends primarily on the removal of these deficiencies. ?

Actually in a nutshell, Schumacher (1973) establishes that at the origin of Mass Unemployment and Migration lies Poverty, whereas as the solution to both phenomena he contends that it is Education, to which he even dedicates the whole Chapter Six titled The Greatest Resource – Education that runs from page 54 to page 72 of his book.

Last but not least, the UN also aligns with Schumacher’s latter point and considers the people-related or human component to be the fundamental requirement of development (UN: Last updated Jan 21, 2022, webpage), and this fact constitutes a critical point to be embraced the world over if people want to reach the Sustainability or the Permanence of their achievements (see 1973 Schumacher book’s Chapter Two titled Peace and Permanence on pp.11-24 of the book).

References

Chirot, D. & Hall, T. D. (1982) World-System Theory. In?Annual Review of Sociology?Vol.8 [pp.81-106]. Available?here.

Grosfoguel, R. (2000) Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America. In?Nepantla: Views from South Vol.1 No.2 [p. 347-374] –?Project MUSE – Available here.

Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs. Available here.

Singer, H. W. (1988)?Dual economy. In P. Deane & J. Kuper [Editors]?A Lexicon of Economics. London & New York: Routledge [pp.94-95]. Available here.

UN (Last updated Jan 21, 2022) Concept of Development. In UN Documentation: Development. New York: Dag Hammarskj?ld Library. Available at here.

Endnote

[1] [Endnote added by the author of the present article] To illustrate this point, I would like to share with you Njuguna Njuguna’s post of December 17 (2021) on Facebook available here highlighting the striking level of some people’s extreme poverty in developing countries. In a somehow related context, this same Facebook post was also evoked in one of my previous Linkedin posts available here.??