Email: szalanga@bethel

1. Convergence, National Development and Nigeria’s Social-Economic Realities: Interdisciplinary Lessons and Insights By Samuel Zalanga, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Reconciliation Studies Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive #24 Saint Paul, MN 55112. Email: szalanga@bethel.edu

2. THE IDEA OF CONVERGENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD Story from a Documentary Film: “This is No Where.”

3. THE DIEA OF CONVERGENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD Key Elements of the Enlightenment Project: • The Reign of Reason • The Reign of Science • The Reign of Technology • The Reign of Free Enterprise • The Reign of Liberal Democracy

4. THE DIEA OF CONVERGENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD • A little learning is a dangerous thing.Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,and drinking largely sobers us again. • ―Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

5. FLASHBACK: NIGERIA IN SEARCH OF PURPOSE AND FOCUS IN THE SECOND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN Objectives of the Second National Development: • A united, strong and self-reliant nation • A great and dynamic economy • A just and egalitarian society • A land of bright and full opportunities for all citizens • A free and democratic society

6. FASTFORWARD: EVALUATING NIGERIA’S HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN UNDP REPORT 2013 The United Nations Human Development Report, asserted in its 2013 report that: Nigeria is not improving its human development index.” According to this report, “68 per cent of Nigerians are stated to be living below $1.25 daily while adult illiteracy rate for adults (both sexes) is 61.3 per cent. The report comes despite the reported growth in the Nigerian economy, with the country recording a GDP growth rate of 6.99 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

7. THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT: PROFESSOR DUDLEY SEERS • What has been happening to Poverty? • What has been happening to Unemployment? • What has been happening to Inequality? If anyone of these indicators is increasing or worsening, the nation is not developing, no matter the rate of economic growth.

8. THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT: PROFESSOR DENIS GOULET According to Professor Goulet, there are: “Three Core Values of Development” • Sustenance: The ability to meet Basic Needs. Improved livelihood. • Self Esteem: A sense of worth to be a person and not a tool for the need of others. When social system promotes human values e.g., respect, human dignity, integrity and self-determination.

9. THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT: PROFESSOR DENIS GOULET • Freedom from Servitude: Being emancipated from oppressive material conditions, and not being a slave to nature, beliefs, oppressive institutions or people.

10. What is Sustainable Development? Implications for Nigeria Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs. – World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED).

11. What is Sustainable Development? Implications for Nigeria Four Dimensions of Sustainability: • Human Sustainability: “The health, education, skills, knowledge, leadership and access to services constitute human capital. Investments in education, health, and nutrition of individuals have become accepted as part of economic development.”

12. What is Sustainable Development? Implications for Nigeria Four Dimensions of Sustainability: • Social Sustainability: This “means maintaining social capital. Social capital is investments and services that create the basic framework for society. It lowers the cost of working together and facilitates cooperation: trust lowers transaction cost.” Shared values.

13. What is Sustainable Development? Implications for Nigeria Four Dimensions of Sustainability: • Economic Sustainability: The goal here is to maintain economic capital. “The widely accepted definition of economic sustainability is maintenance of capital, or keeping capital intact. Thus Hicks’ definition of income – the amount one can consume during a period and still be as well off at the end of the period, -- can define economic sustainability, as it devolves on consuming value-added (interest), rather than capital.”

14. What is Sustainable Development? Implications for Nigeria Four Dimensions of Sustainability: • Environmental Sustainability: “Economic Sustainability itself seeks to improve human welfare by protecting natural capital. As contrasted with economic capital, natural capital consists of water, land, air, minerals and ecosystem services; hence much is converted to manufactured or economic capital. Environment includes the sources of raw materials used for human needs …”

15. EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GOVERNANCE: (DEMOCRACY OR AUTOCRACY)? i) The degree to which the political system engages in redistribution from the rich to the poor especially in highly unequal societies. ii) The degree to which the political system engages in the provision of public services to all citizens. iii) The degree to which the political system deals with concentration and control of the country’s wealth and productive assets.

16. EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GOVERNANCE: (DEMOCRACY OR AUTOCRACY)? iv) The degree to which the political system or government promotes and is open to social mobility. v) The degree to which the political system or government deals with the accountability of the executive and other elected representatives. vi) The degree to which the government or political system deals with the problem of commitment to public agreement or enforcement of contracts.

17. EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GOVERNANCE: (DEMOCRACY OR AUTOCRACY)? vii) The degree to which the political system is stable, predictable, reliable and responsive, owing to the rule of law, separation of powers and constitutional protection and guarantees. viii) Political institutions and their effects on genuine political representation: democracy and Gerrymandering; majoritarian vs. proportional elections.

18. THINKING ABOUT INCENTIVE STRUCTURE: BEHAVIORAL ASPECTS OFA THRIVING FREE MARKET CAPITALISM • Economically productive behavior must be more profitable than socially and economically unproductive behavior. • The environment must be conducive for people to be willing to take risk. This is necessary for entrepreneurship. • People must have trust in the system and in others.

19. GALLUP’S MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY ABOUT GLOBAL BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: THE DESIRE FOR JOBS 1. People want to have a good job and they want their children to have a good job. 2. Jobs define your relationship to your city, country and the world. 3. Jobs will define the main substance of leadership in the 21st century. 4. Jobs will define the substance of laws and regulations that are to be made in the future.

20. GALLUP’S MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY ABOUT GLOBAL BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: THE DESIRE FOR JOBS 5. Jobs will define the substance of education at all levels of learning. 6. Jobs will define the substance of conflict and their long term consequences. 7. Jobs will define the substance and purpose of migration, and the destination of migrants. 8. Jobs will define who attracts innovative entrepreneurs and talented people who have skills.

21. A CONTEMPORARY ISSUE AND CHALLENGE FOR AFRICAN COUNTRIES: THE WAITHOOD GENERATION a) Waithood is the period of living in suspension between childhood and adulthood. b) It is a prolonged period of adolescence and an involuntary situation that delays one becoming an adult. c) The Situation of Waithood affects the ability of the youth in the following ways: I) Ability to secure a job.

22. A CONTEMPORARY ISSUE AND CHALLENGE FOR AFRICAN COUNTRIES: THE WAITHOOD GENERATION II) Lacking appropriate learning opportunities. III) Inability to pay their bills or live independently, taking care of themselves. IV) Inability to form a family and provide them protection and take of their needs.

23. A CONTEMPORARY ISSUE AND CHALLENGE FOR AFRICAN COUNTRIES: THE WAITHOOD GENERATION V) Inability to fully engage in civic responsibilities. VI) It affects people’s imagination because of living in continuous presence, which makes it hard to plan for the future.

24. KEY LESSONS FROM ASIAN TIGERS WITH REGARD TO JOB CREATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT a) The existence of leaders that have vision, and are disciplined enough to pursue it. b) They focused seriously on increasing average worker productivity. c) They cultivated a culture of high savings rate at national level: Used for investment in infrastructure and education.

25. KEY LESSONS FROM ASIAN TIGERS WITH REGARD TO JOB CREATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT d) They maintained stable and relatively low wages over a long period of time. e) They had and enforced an official policy constraining elite conspicuous consumption. f) They ensured having political stability. Relevant for risk analysis (Far Eastern Economic Review).

26. KEY LESSONS FROM ASIAN TIGERS WITH REGARD TO JOB CREATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Lesson: There is no single culture or strategy that is perfectly adapted to economic growth and development. Each nation will have to figure out its path out of relative obscurity.

27. PATHWAY TO NATIONAL WELLBEING: SEVEN STEPS 1. Law and Order: Fear vs. Crime. Fear sucks energy form potential economic activities. 2. Food and Shelter: “Being physically or mentally wiped out because of lack of food and shelter is a nonstarter’ (Clifton, p.173). 3. Key Institutions: Healthcare and Education. Literate and infant mortality are dependent on them.

28. PATHWAY TO NATIONAL WELLBEING: SEVEN STEPS 4. Mobility and Communication: “Mobility is important for economies, especially as it applies to job development” (Clifton, p.175). Mobility of thought and expression. 5. Youth Development. No nation has a future if it discounts its youth.

29. PATHWAY TO NATIONAL WELLBEING: SEVEN STEPS 6. Job Climate: Countries, regions, or cities that create a good job climate would attract the best and grow faster, creating jobs. 7. Job Enhancement: Can people in a “country get ahead by working hard or not?”

30. CONCLUSION: HOW THOMAS PIKETTY’S CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY BECOMES RELEVANT Piketty’s book generated global discussion and debate because his central arguments regurgitate a point that E. F. Schumacher made in the title of his book: “Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.”

31. CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC ORTHODOXY: • KUZNETS’ CURVE: “According to Kuznets’ theory, income inequality would automatically decrease in advance phases of capitalist accumulation regardless of economic policy choices or other differences between countries until eventually, it stabilized at an acceptable level (Piketty, p.11).

32. CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC ORTHODOXY: IMPLICATION OF KUZNETS’ CURVE IN LAY PERSON’S LANGUAGE: “Growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats” (Piketty, p.11). What this means is that ordinary people should be patient with the current structure of inequality, or injustice in the economic system, because by and by, they will get pie in the sky. It is a kind of Kierkagaardian teleological suspension of the ethical.

33. CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC ORTHODOXY: • SOLOW’S BALANCED GROWTH THEORY: Robert Solow’s theory of “balanced growth path” was proposed in 1956. The central argument of Solow is that when an economy is growing, the benefits of the growth will diffuse to all sectors and areas of the economy leading to widespread and inclusive prosperity (e.g., output, incomes, profits, wages, capital, asset prices etc.). The people will all move in locked step in the same direction and the same pace. Thus “every social group will benefit from growth to the same degree with no deviations to the norm” (Piketty, p.11).

34. CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC ORTHODOXY: • THE BROADER IMPLICATION OF KUZNETS AND SOLOW THEORIES FOR THE DEBATE ABOUT MODERN CAPITALISM: The broader relevance of the Kuznets’ curve supported by Robert Solow in the context of modern debate over capitalism and inequality is that it is a new breadth of fresh air that presumably discredited the apocalyptic prediction of leftwing radicals such as Karl Marx in the 19th century about the consequence of inequality and distribution of wealth for the future of capitalism. In brief, Kuznets and Solow told people to take it easy, no cause for alarm, and that all of us will end up by and by in “The State of Nirvana.”

35. CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC ORTHODOXY: • KEY OBSERVATION BASED ON PIKETTY’S ANALYSIS (1): The contingent nature of the forces of divergence and convergence exist and operate in all societies. Their emergence and ability to prevail or be subdued are open-ended questions. There is nothing guaranteed and automatic. What this means is that the future of wealth distribution contingent on certain social forces and processes and not inevitable. One point of warning for those who expect that the efficient operation of the free market will lead to more or greater economic equality is that current inequality in income and wealth is happening under conditions of market perfection and not market imperfection.

36. CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC ORTHODOXY: • KEY OBSERVATION BASED ON PIKETTY’S ANALYSIS (2): The degree of inequality that is tolerated in every society is a product of social, economic and political forces that shape people’s conception of what is just, fair and right by the general population or collective. If the majority of the people believe or perceive the distribution of resources in society as unequal, unjust and unfair, they will organize to fight against it and change that social reality. The question then is: who are the social actors in the contemporary world, and what is their perception of current inequality in the world?

37. The Future is Open-Ended and Contingent: Institutions, Social Forces, and Human Values Matter Thank You!

38. References • Young, Scott T. and Dhand, K. Kathy. 2013. Sustainability: Essentials for Business. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. p. 3. • Goodland, Robert. 2002. “Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental” Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change. • Clifton, Jim (Chairman Gallup Group). 2011. The Coming Jobs War. New York: Gallup Press.

39. References • Howana, Alcinda. 2012. The Time of Youth: Work, Social Change, and Politics in Africa. Boulder: Kumarian Press. • Roland, Gerard. 2014. Development Economics. Boston: Pearson. • Piketty, Thomas. 20014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press.