Economics education and the politics of knowledge in the Caribbean

This dissertation is part of a larger project to understand the relationship between worldviews, social institutions, and processes of development in the developing world in general and in the Caribbean in particular. It is an attempt to integrate two sets of arguments: the idea of autopoiesis or self-production on the one hand, and the idea of the evolution of worldviews on the other.;Autopoiesis refers to the self-production (self-maintenance and self-transcendence) of all living systems and thus also of social systems. One major characteristic of the self-production of any living system is that changes within the system are not determined by changes in the environment but by the internal structure of the system. For social systems this means that autopoiesis is critically dependent on the quality of its collective information reservoir, or culture. My explanation of Caribbean underdevelopment therefore emphasizes the colonial worldview and how this correlates with a command democracy and a mercantile economy.;The application of neoclassical economics to analyses of underdevelopment has been disastrous in its reductionism and its positivist epistemology, which deny any cultural influence on economic behavior. This study is a political analysis of the epistemology of neoclassical economics, to show how the uncritical acceptance of this paradigm contributes to the confusion inherent in the colonial worldview and thus to underdevelopment. This study contributes to a successor paradigm in Caribbean development theory that integrates all levels of social analysis.;In this study I focus on economics education at the University of the West Indies to examine if and in what ways economics education can tell us more about the above-mentioned relationships. This study is an exercise in the philosophy of development, and specifically it contains an argument for the invention of a new and integrated "science of development."...