Stepping into the mud with the barefoot economist, Manfred Max-Neef
" Walking barefoot It’s the apparent inability of politicians to view the economic growth paradigm as destructive that opens up spaces for alternative narratives of the likes of Max-Neef to fill. After winning the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics, the Chilean economist’s metaphor was inspired as a result of the ten years he spent working in extreme poverty in the Sierras, jungles and urban areas of different parts of Latin America. It was during this period that the economist from Berkeley began to view his profession in a different light. What subsequently happened was to change his life for ever. “I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru”, recalls Max-Neef. “It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we...