For Morality’s Sake! (Presidential Address)

After much wandering in the woods, the key exponents and practitioners of the discipline seem to have rediscovered that development economics is a worthy discipline in its own right. The general climate seems to be one of homecoming celebrations. This is odd because ‘rational’ behaviour should not have led development economists to cutting down, in the first place, the bough on which they had rested so comfortably. But, looking back, this self-sacrificing posture was indeed assumed for a time by some distinguished votaries of the subdiscipline who could well have wound up their shop. To cut losses, such development economists even sought to arrange a happy reunion of the ‘prodigal’ son (development economics) with the somewhat annoyed parents (neoclassical economics). They meant well, thinking that the subdiscipline would gain in union what it lost in estrangement and that it would thus live happily ever after, aglow with the halo of scientific rectitude, though far removed from the ‘madding crowd’! [Schultz {I 964); Chenery (1983)].