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This paper suggests that the concept of sustainable development has considerable limitations because it has become abstract and too often ignores that many forms of development (oil and gas exploitation, mining) are not sustainable. Development, as the well‐worn cliche puts it, is about people. Our approach at the Community Development Institute focuses on how individuals can become sustainable and motivated to develop their own potential while at the same time working towards the development of their organizations and communities. Discussions about development thus move from abstractions to ways in which specific individuals can live good lives (as they define them) while contributing to their communities. The concept of sustainable people is linked to that of community development, which offers a middle way for the creation of employment and wealth between the efforts of the state and those of the private sector, especially in poor and marginalized areas.

The World Bank claims that its main mission is, “To fight poverty with professionalism for lasting results.” Many of the mega projects supported by bank funds have made life more difficult for those they claimed would benefit from them. The bank funded a project in the Tana River Valley of Kenya in 2001 that was driven by the ideas of the environmental movement rather than the needs of local people. They will be displaced by the $10 project so that rare monkeys can thrive in a wildlife reserve.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.