Unambiguous Ambiguity

Heinz W. Arndt, in his Economic Development: The History of An Idea (1987: 6), argues that “economic growth was unambiguous in its meaning. The question was why people thought such growth increasingly desirable for some years and then became doubtful.” The idea of an ever-increasing gross national product and pro capita income was seen as a straightforward and seemingly accurate methodology to measure and practice the linear progression of a nation out of its pre-modern phase into an industrial and modern era. Yet, over time such certainty has become doubtful. The solution to that puzzle had soon emerged, as Arndt (1987: 7) contends, from the very idea of development – as opposed to economic growth: “[d]evelopment, in contrast, has meant almost all things to all men and women. This story has no simple plot. If there is a central theme, it is … one of increasing complexity and divergence.” It is the very complexity of the phenomenon of development that has placed economic growth measurements within a broader discourse and made it one indicator among others, certainly necessary but not sufficient.


An example of this dialectic is represented by the economic analysis I presented in one of my previous works: An Augmented Growth Model Including Cultural Attitudes Toward Work (2005). Such analysis has not led to any conclusive findings in terms of the relevance of cultural aspects in a discourse of economic development.

The findings do not support the macroeconomic theory in its totality. These statistical results seem unable to capture some aspects of socioeconomic development – such as the importance of education and the relevance of culture in economic activities – that are recognized as crucial in other fields of study.

Drawing from hermeneutic theory, one can legitimately consider the economic analysis of growth as an integral component of the social text that, along side with the fixed text of the conversations and the other historical documents, becomes the principle data source for this research.

Paul Ricoeur (1981: 152) points out the two possibilities that are engendered by “the eclipse of the surrounding world by the quasi-world of text.” On the one hand, the reader can “remain in the suspense of the text, treating it as a worldless and authorless object” (Ricoeur 1981: 152). In this case, one can only explain the text in terms of its internal relations and its structure, and perhaps its statistical correlations. On the other hand, one “can lift the suspense and fulfill the text … restoring it to living communication.” In this case, as Ricoeur (1981: 152) argues, “we interpret the text.”

Within the realm of social sciences, and specifically when researching social and economic development, the idea of exerting one’s ability to interpret may seem elusive and inconclusive. That is from a positivistic conceptual framework. The theory of interpretation, developed by Paul Ricoeur (1981: 158), suggests a “more complementary and reciprocal relation between explanation and interpretation.” John Thompson (in Ricoeur 1981: 16) points out that Ricoeur contends that human action, no less than literary texts, “displays a sense as well as a reference; it possesses an internal structure as well as projecting a possible world,” that is to say, “a potential mode of human existence which can be unfolded through a process of interpretation.”

It is precisely such “potential mode of human existence [italics mine]” that the economist Heinz W. Arndt (1987: 7) was acknowledging when noting that development “has meant almost all things to all men and women.” It is such a mode of human existence that Martin Heidegger (1972: 31) was laying the foundation of when declaring that “all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has … remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and … its fundamental task.” It is the individual and communal historicity of a person and his or her own community that shapes the hopes for an improved future and solicits actions in the present, the only lived time at one’s disposal. Richard Kearney (2001: 1-2) elaborates on Heidegger’s intuition by challenging the classical “metaphysical tendency to subordinate the possible to the actual as the insufficient to the sufficient,” and by “refusing to impose a kingdom [that is, a universally established development standard], or to declare it already accomplished from the beginning … [in so doing, each] person carries within him/herself the capacity to be transfigured … and to transfigure … [a given historical situation] by making … possibility ever more incarnate and alive.”