New Left Review I/31, May-June 1965

Michael Barratt-Brown

Intellectual Underdevelopment

Study of economics, as distinct from the study of political economy, is generally thought to be concerned with choice between different uses of scarce resources and the interacting results of choices that are made. Some months ago, Dudley Seers, now Director General in the Ministry of Overseas Development, mounted a scathing attack upon the current practice of applying to the developing economies, of India or Africa or Latin America, the concepts, institutional framework and assumptions about human behaviour used in the economics of developed industrial countries like the us or Great Britain. He particularly attacked economists’ concern with alternative uses of given resources rather than with the expansion of these resources; with the causes of cyclical movements rather than with the causes of varying rates of growth; and with closed national entities rather than with movements in the whole world economy. [1] Dudley Seers, �The Limitations of the Special Case’, Bulletin of the Oxford University

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