3 - The Vain Search for Universal Generalizations: 2. The Poor Quality of Official Statistics

Summary

Those economists who search for grand generalizations on the socio-economic organization of the rural tropical world may adopt one or more of four basic approaches. They may rely on their own ‘basic commonsense’, in the manner of Schultz or W.A. Lewis; they may adopt an evolutionary approach, in the manner of Boserup – and, incidentally, of many neo-marxists; they may themselves undertake fieldwork designed to test the generalizations of others, as did Bliss and Stern, or use other peoples' field material; or they may primarily rely on official statistics.

If this book has one main theme it is that of the weakness of the first of these approaches (that of basic commonsense), so that many of its chapters deal in a practical, empirical way with specific subjects, such as indebtedness or migration, which are particularly apt to lead the ‘commonsense adherents’ astray. The second approach is gravely hampered by the lack of appropriate historical material, especially in tropical Africa. This is not, I need hardly add, because third-world countries ‘have no history’, but that the history is the wrong sort – political, dynastic, urban, rather than rural and economic. As for the third approach, rather few economists or even agronomists attempt much wide-ranging socio-economic fieldwork themselves; and it is, alas, most unusual for economists, with the notable exception of several at the official Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, to use the findings of field anthropologists – presuming them to be myopic, trivial, irrelevant and disinclined to generalize.