Background: People and Development

Abstract

Future historians will see the present world society as frozen. Not that events to occupy the media are lacking, between petty civil wars and terrorism, but in the most important field of all — development that would remove gross inequality, and at the same time adapt to the constraints of our planet — we find hesitation and uncertainty; after exhilarating progress in the 1960s we see now a discouraged halt. Nearly three-quarters of the 5.4 billion world population are suspended in an intermediate, transitional, condition — they are far from primitive, but not yet fully modern. These people, living in the national units of the developing countries, have been touched by modernity, in a process that should have continued on to complete development, but that is now stalled.