Well, what do y’all think of this in light of the following excerpt of a strikingly conservative Prospect essay on Third World development:

One of the things that makes development political is that it is a collective process. Modernisation involves the creation of communities; this requires a sense of a common good. Although the effect of modernisation is to liberate individuals from the binds of family, church and village, it does so by creating a new society and a wider community based on law. For most of the developed world today this collective spirit has taken the form of nationalism. Somewhere in the process of development, the individual is asked to sacrifice his private gain for the public good. The entrepreneurs of 19th-century Japan could have invested their money more safely on Wall Street than in Japan, but the thought hardly occurred to them. Their governing motive was to put behind them the humiliations Japan was suffering at the hands of the west. This was a national feeling that joined the Japanese of the day together as a group; each individual identified with this commitment and felt it personally.

This collective element in development is an economic as well as a political reality. It is no good an individual becoming modern on his own: you can be modern only in a modern society. If you train as an accountant or a lawyer—both core professions in a developed society—you can function only in the context of laws and accounting standards that make your professional skills and ethics meaningful. Development does not happen to individuals; it happens to societies. And the society must will it collectively. What happens when the will is individual rather than collective is visible all around us. Prospect reported recently that there were more Ethiopian doctors practising in Chicago than in Ethiopia. In Sierra Leone, one entire hospital is run by Médecins Sans Frontières, while many excellent Sierra Leonian doctors work in Britain. A UNDP report on the Arab world shows that the main ambition of young men in Arab countries is to live abroad if they can.

The men and women who built modern Japan would never have thought like this nor put personal goals ahead of national goals. For many, development may entail some personal sacrifice. This will not take place unless there is a sense of contributing to the greater good of a national community. This is true for doctors who decide to stay at home and accept lower salaries than they could achieve abroad, and also for state officials whose loyalty to the national project means that they will not accept bribes. If there are enough such people, these commitments to the nation can become the dominant value of the society.

This raises some interesting questions about the difficulty of staying loyal to one’s own place in the modern economy. How many of us reading this (or writing this blog) live in or near the place where we grew up, and where our people live? Caleb, yes. Mitch, yes. Anybody else? I would guess that most of my friends don’t live in the town they grew up. I don’t think most people nowadays expect that they (or their children) will stick around after college to hang out a shingle in the old hometown. It’s possible there won’t be work for the college grad there, but it’s also the case that it will not have seriously occurred to many to think of being loyal to their home and extended family, versus setting out to follow their own destiny. I’m a prime example of this – though my wife is not, because we moved back to her hometown in part because we wanted our kids to grow up closer to family. Anyway, I wanted to raise the question about whether the best educated men and women from smaller towns – the kind that would be expected traditionally to make up the rising leadership class – even think in terms of locality anymore. Or do we all put personal goals ahead of the good of our particular place? I think the more modern slogan would be, “Think personally, act wherever you happen to be at the moment.”