The Parable of the Underdeveloped Economist

Abstract

An underdeveloped economist is a person from an underdeveloped country who has been trained as an economist and who suffers from the double disadvantage of intellectual honesty and a social consciousness. On the one hand, he is too competent to spend his life working on the (minor) ramifications of a theory that is far from being based on ground-in actuality. On the other, he is emotionally involved, a part of the culture of poverty of the people he comes from. To him, the poverty of the economy he comes from is far less than the poverty of the economics that he has painstakingly acquired. In terms of the issues that this raises, the case of my friend Dilip Pandey may be of interest to underdeveloped social scientists.

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