Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Co-Evolutionary Revisioning of the Future

Norgarrd's 1994 book is his only one, and it is very unconventional in style, form and content. His text is dense but bereft of jargon and citations, which he deals with in detailed bibliographic essays at the end. The book's rigor is not represented in the title, but the title does show the extent that Norgarrd will be attacking traditional conceptions of development, environment and economics. His basic thesis conceives of a co-evolutionary theory, where "the world can be thought of as having become a patchwork quilt of loosely interconnected, co-evolving social and ecological systems." 90 These social, economic, cultural, religious, business and family systems do not exist in a vacuum but co-evolve together. Norgarrd is a Economics Professor at UC Berkeley and his most incisive critiques are of conventional economic thinking, in a vein similar to that offered by JK Galbraith. "The logic of economics does not yield unique answers when more than one social unit might express an interest in choosing. Without a single answer, economics cannot be used technocratically to deduce what society should do." 125 His solution is to put more weight behind the power of "groups as decision making units". "The modern portrayal of social systems as the sum of the interactions of autonomous individuals responding to their individual values DENIES interconnections between people and nature and thereby both the existence of and the need for social and environmental values." 131 Norgarrd's more specific suggestions to how our world can be conceptualized better, work well in concert with JK Galbraith's critique of standard economic logic. This is a well thought out book that anyone who is concerned about more accurate economic assessment of environment should read.