Today

Today my group met with one of the Deputy Directors of the National Planning Commission for Namibia. This is the agency that is tasked with planning for what kinds of development projects the government should emphasize in the short and long term. They created "Vision 2030," an ideal for what the country will be like in the year 2030. We read some of this document in class, but it was nicely summarized by our presenter as: "basically, by 2030, we want to live like you guys [referring to the Americans in the room], whatever that means."

As a sidenote, it is interesting to be in a country that is so new (~20 years since independence) and which has such a small population (~2 million) so the scale is so small that people and institutions that are extremelly influential on the national level are relatively easily accessible...

Back to national development: it is actually a very interesting question regarding development as to what being "more developed" actually should mean. In many cases, the answer seems to end up being to try to make the institutions and culture of [insert country here] more like the institutions and culture of the US....which is a little strange since the US doesn't tend to rank at the top of such things such as life satisfaction. Apparently, instead of judging its own success by how much its GDP has increased, the country of Bhutan has instead started measuring its "Gross National Happiness (GNH)." (See http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/).

Coincidentally, today's TED talk is related: http://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile.html
As mentioned in that talk, I think that a country that is helping people move up Maslow's Hierachy is indeed making development "progress," whether or not GDP is increasing....