mbayers@mmm.com wrote:
> A comment from a 1993 book by Harland Cleveland:
>
> "Many years ago, when I was in the foreign aid business in Washington, I
> complained that we were "tackling twenty-year problems with five-year
> plans manned by two-year personnel and funded by one-year appropriations."
> That is still an uncomfortably accurate description of the world
> development enterprise."
>
> He wrote of 'changing the world' -- he titled the book, after all, Birth
> of a New World. Given that many of us have similar (if a little less
> lofty) goals, can you identify some steps that we can take, individually
> or colectively, to move us toward better approaches to these 'twenty year
> problems'?
Michael,
the solution is not a popular one--it is to stop solving social problems
with political solutions. An alternative (or corollary) is not to mix
social solutions with political ones. The last recommendation I'll make
here is that we should avoid, at all costs, superimposing our culture and
values on an autonomous world.
I suspect that if we have used these three principles, we would have
avoided the most costly of blunders in our foreign policy history.
Doc
-- Richard C. "Doc" Holloway, Limen Development Network - olypolys@nwrain.com" An institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>