[^3] Both are questioned by economists such as Amartya Sen...

[^3] Both are questioned by economists such as Amartya Sen, Joseph Steiglitz, Omano Edigheji, and Peter Evans, partly because these approaches have failed in their own terms.

As Evans said, “ Neither the original [state-centered] development project nor its neo-liberal successor managed to combine increased standards of living with increased inclusion in a way that came close to replicating the experiences of the industrialized North during the Post-War II “Golden Age of Capitalism.” The vast majority of the citizens of Africa and Latin America, as well as most Asian agriculturalists (outside of China) experienced little ‘catch-up’ in the sense of a diminished gap between their living standards and those of the North.

Consequently, it is not surprising that the vision of increased capital accumulation in the presence of functioning markets as sufficient to deliver well-being no longer has the political or intellectual charisma that it did.” Peter Evans, “Population Health and Development: An Institutional-Cultural Approach to Capability Expansion,” paper for Successful Societies Volume of the Successful Societies Program, October 12, 2006 draft.

It seems to me highly significant that a critique of statist and neo-liberal approaches is appearing from the heart of establishment institutions themselves such as the World Bank and UN Development Programmes. See for instance Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, Eds., Culture and Public Action (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004).

[^4] For a striking example of the convergence on a theoretical level of “progressive populist” and “conservative” economics, see Paul Krugman’s essay, “Who Was Milton Friedman?” in The New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, pp.

27-[^33]: To make the case about the “predictive power” of rational choice theory, Krugman, like most rational choice theorists, takes mid- and late twentieth century America, with its highly individualist, hyper-competitive, consumer-oriented culture, as a universal depiction of the human condition.

It is important to note that democratic intellectuals with a citizen-centered orientation from elsewhere, such as Michael Edwards of the Ford Foundation, Omano Edigheji of the Centre of Policy Studies, and Xolela Mangcu, a leading South African public intellectual, have differing views about “populism’s” global potential.