C.4 An Institute of Human Development
     
  4.1 The word "development" is sufficiently abstract to have a rich and confusing abundance of referents. In one of its meanings, "development" has been a word of hope and purpose for most of humankind in our times. The older idea of progress was transmuted into the idea of development in the aspirations of governments and peoples in the years since the Second World War. In quite other (though ultimately related senses) "development" has biological referents. Harvard has a Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology and similar labels stud the course catalogues of universities everywhere. The extraordinary progress in molecular biology, genetics and other subjects in this century has enriched and complicated understanding of the evolution of species and the development of organisms over their life cycles.
     
  4.2 The idea of "human development" has roots in both these usages. The vision of development for nations and societies was at first a vision of economic growth, made possible by the diffusion of modern knowledge and organisation. The rise of national income accounting made possible the use of Gross National Product per capita as a central measure of economic development. There were always some dissatisfactions with this centrality of economic concepts and measures, and "human development" has emerged as a more comprehensive idea. It has now reached canonical international status in the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme, which presents annually a statistical index of human development for each country. This index combines GNP per capita with two other measures, life expectancy at birth and literacy level, thus extending the idea of development to embrace measures of health and education.
     
   

Human development" in the sense related to the life-cycle from conception to death has been a subject of practical and scientific attention from time long past. It has had biological, medical, psychological, educational and other foci in various combinations in different programmes. There have been, for examples, the well-known and influential Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, which had roots in the Progressive Education movement and has been dominated by psychologists and social scientists; a (not altogether successful) transformation at Pennsylvania State University of its Home Economics College into a College of Health and Human Development; the Max Planck Institute of Human Development in Berlin; the Human Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; the (U.S.) Social Science Research Council Committee on Life-Course Perspectives on Human Development. All of these programmes have involved some intermixture of the biological, psychological and social sciences. Recent progress in these branches of knowledge, and particularly in the biological sciences, has opened new perspectives that have captured the Commission's attention.

     
  4.3 The inter-relations between human development as social progress and the development of individual members of society have been perennial moral, religious, as well as less elevated concerns of thoughtful people. In this last half-century of development programmes and theories, there has been general appreciation that development of societies requires healthy, educated populations, and this appreciation has been given scientific elaboration in such forms as the human capital theories we have noted earlier. One of our members, Dr. J. Fraser Mustard, has fostered much work on these matters at the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He has brought to the Commission's attention some of the remarkable advances in recent years in our understanding of these inter-relationships. They make a strong case for the view that there is an excellent opportunity for AKU to make a major contribution to development policy and practice through a programme in human development. Such a programme would build on AKU's existing work in health and education and would complement in essential ways another thrust at the problems of development that we are proposing in an Institute of Economic Growth and Society.
     
  4.4 Research Findings on Human Development
     
    The arguments and evidence that have impressed us deserve some exposition as justification for our recommendations. There is, first, the accumulating understanding of the interactions between economic growth and the health and longevity of populations. Following on the influential studies of McKeown there has been a new understanding that the historic improvement in health and life expectancy in Western populations was not simply due to gains in medical care and public health measures, but also depended on rising incomes and consequently better nutrition and living conditions. And conversely, the importance of improved health and well-being for raising economic productivity and growth is stressed in the World Bank's Development Reports, where the 'burden of disease' is quantified in an index.
     
    In his 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, th,, Chicago economic historian, Robert W. Fogel. presented a remarkable theory that since 1700 a "synergism between technological anti physiological improvements has produced a fortu of human evolution, much more rapid than natural selection, which is still ongoing in both OECD and developing countries".Fogel's argument for this bold thesis is based largely on data from Eurolw (where the longest and most adequate statistical series exist). He asserts that "for many European nations before the middle of the 19th century, the national production of food was at such low levels that the poorer classes were bound to have been malnourished under any conceivable circumstances".Data on available calorieS indicate that the majority of adult males in all classes must have been small and light in the l8th century and existing data on height shows they were still "stunted" in modern comparison by 1860. Twenty per cent of the population of France, in 1790 was so poorly nourished that they cotthl either not work regularly or could do at most three hours a day of light work. In this lecture, Fogel reports his earlier calculation that improved nutrition and the consequent increased labour intensity accounted for 30% of the growth of per capita income in Britain between 1790 and 1980 ; he extends his calculations in this Nobel lecture by taking into account the physiological improvement in efficient use of fueledl energy by healthy, better nourished individuals, and concludes that the combination would account for a full 50% of British economic growth since 1790.
     
    Guided by the work of Scrimshaw anti others on the relations between nutrition anti infection, Fogel argues that "the high disease rates of the period (to the mid-19th century) were not merely a cause of malnutrition but undoubtedly,to a considerable degree, a consequence of exceedingly poor diet".He then presents extensive evidence that malnutrition in early childhood leads to increased vulnerability not only to infectious but also to chronic diseases. He .Shows in particular that stunting is correlated 1with increased mortality. His dramatic assertion ,that a new form of human evolution has emerged, describes a process in which human beings have increased notably in size, reduced their vulnerability to disease, and hence achieved still-continuing increases in life expectancy.

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