Urgent thinking required about development

摘要

The philosopher of science Francis Bacon put it succinctly at the dawn of the scientific revolution when he wrote: "knowledge is power". The World Bank put forward the same idea in a slightly different way this week when it devoted its annual report on world deve'lopment to the central role of knowledge in the development process (see page 529). Its interpretation of the word is somewhat broader than Bacon's; while the latter was speaking primarily of what we would now call 'natural science', the bank uses the term to embrace both technical know-how and knowledge of attributes, ranging from the quality of a worker to the credit-worthiness of a company. But its main theme is surprisingly similar: "knowledge is development".