In this episode of In Pursuit of Development, Dan Banik speaks with Yale historian David Engerman about how “development” became one of the most powerful and contested ideas of the modern era. Drawing on Engerman’s 2025 book Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made, the conversation follows six influential South Asian economists and policymakers, Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Manmohan Singh, Mahbub ul Haq, Rehman Sobhan, and Lal Jayawardene, from Cambridge classrooms to planning commissions and global institutions. Along the way, they unpack the enduring arguments that still shape policy today: poverty versus inequality, markets versus states, trade versus protection, and expertise versus politics. The episode also explores how ideas associated with human development emerged, why “the Global South” became a category with political force, and what these intellectual friendships and rivalries reveal about the promises and tensions inside the development project.

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The widening gap

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