Mind the Gap
Seventeen Sightings of the “Social” in Economic Development Policy Writing
in The International Journal of Social Quality
Author:
Ramond Apthorpe
Ramond Apthorpe
London School of Economics and
Political Science arap.torp@gmail.com
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Semantic codes constitute the world (or parts of it), not in a mechanistic “cause-and-effect” sense but through another type of linkage. This article explores some of the semantic code, the “semantic DNA,” of mainstream neoclassical economic development policy thinking and writing and looks at what that mode of thinking incorporates into its discourse as “social.” The various forms of the “social” in economics discourse add up, from a sociologist’s viewpoint, to disappointingly little: they mainly consist of a miscellaneous set of noneconomic aspects that mainstream economic thinking can use to blame for the policy-performance gap between what such thinking promises and what it often actually delivers.