Development is just one part of it...

I think a lot of people think of the field of development as an "aside."  It's an extra topic, thrown in after everyone is done talking about "the economy," "national security," and "oil prices."

But, in reality, studying development - and everything that goes with it, including poverty, malnutrition, lagging/unequal health and educations systems, the middle class (or decline of it) - is like uncovering the symptoms and struggles that underlie a much bigger problem: a broken U.S. (and global) economy.



You can't study development without understanding the economy, but I think the same is true in reverse - you can't really begin to analyze the economy unless you're going to look at development (or what I'm really getting at: inequality).

Just a few quotes to paint a picture:
On U.S. youth unemployment -
"Nearly 14 percent of college graduates from the classes of 2006 through 2010 can’t find full-time work, and overall just 55.3 percent of people ages 16 to 29 have jobs. That’s the lowest percentage since World War II." (Noreen Malone, New York Magazine)

On neoliberal (still persistent) Reagan/Thatcher policies-
“Now, my worry is . . . that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions . . . who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes -- if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since."

(Sir Alan Budd, a UK Treasury official and strong advocate of monetarism in the 1970s, as quoted in New Statesman)

Finally, on inequality and wages (in the United States)-
"CEO pay, which in 1980 was 40 times larger than that of the average worker, grew to be 400 times to 550 times bigger by 2000, William McDonough, chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, said in an April speech at the Committee for Economic Development in Washington." (Art Pine, Bloomberg)