Course Code: STC312

From time immemorial, humans have sought to define and live a good life. Family, community, and environment framed conceptions of prosperity for millennia. Consider what “prosperity” meant for your ancestors and how it is understood in your family today. The growing extremes of material wealth - resulting from specific economic policies - have implications for peace, security, and the environment that have intensified the search for ways in which all of humanity can flourish. This course explores this most ambitious of human endeavors: the effort of the world's nations to bring prosperity to humankind. We will review the assumptions - beliefs, values, and judgments - that underlie the over eight decades of intense international activity to “modernize” the so-called “underdeveloped” countries of the planet. How and by whom is “progress” defined and implemented? Who benefits, and who is sacrificed? Why has “development “so often failed to increase the welfare of the vast majority of the world’s population, whose biological and social dynamics we can so elegantly analyze? We will use insights from diverse knowledge systems as well as US-based and global efforts to explore how local communities are striving and struggling.