1The concern for long-term economic development has come a long way, hand in hand with the history of one particular generation: that of the baby boomers, the children born over the demographic boom of the post-World War II. My generation.

2Towards the end of the nineteen sixties and beginnings of the nineteen seventies, when the Welfare State seemed not to be so questioned worldwide, there were several global issues at stake. Some had to do with the finite nature of natural resources, others with consumption, technological or production styles. It was a time of important questions, and of deep economic and cultural transformations. A time of confrontation of the capitalist, socialist and communist paradigms. Mathematical models were extensively used to project catastrophic futures with stark realism, or else other more promising scenarios verging on utopia. And for the same reasons, they served as political propaganda. However, none of them contained much economic theory, which seemed to flow along different paths, with discussions marked by the influence of the neoclassical, Keynesian or Marxist paradigms. Nothing much beyond that; maybe some of Joseph A. Schumpeter’s ideas, in as much as technological innovation started to appear as an increasingly noticeable factor of economic growth.

3Yet, over the nineteen eighties, it started to become clear that those discussions were gradually being beaten by facts. Capitalism had broken up its happy marriage with the Fordist “regime of accumulation”, to give way to flexible accumulation; Keynesian policies were being implemented in a different context – with poor results –; the Cold War had reduced Marxism to a mere ideology rather than a scientific theory. Towards the end of that decade, the nations comprising the Soviet bloc fell as if in a domino effect. In view of all these facts recorded along a few years, the core of the intellectual debate changed, and two issues emerged as central, though not contributing to or dependent on the economic theory. On the one hand, the predominance of the financial system became a reality, and Marxist trends claimed their prediction; but on the other, the question of the environment and of sustainable development became dominant in the literature, intertwined with long-term growth projections. Whereas many economists focused on post-Keynesian debates, the neoclassical synthesis and mathematical formalizations, many others got interested in issues of a technical rather than a theoretical nature, related to environmental or other specific topics, whether in the field of micro or macroeconomic policies.

4When back in 1986 I wrote about the crisis of development theories in view of the global crisis, this was already quite a strange topic in the academic arena. The world had certainly lost interest in the long term or, if some concern about this still remained, there were no proposals that could give rise to concrete policies beyond those of the conservationists. At the most, certain regions were encouraged to behave as some Asian ones had done. Naïve critiques of consumerism and capitalism spread all around, as well as the reinforcement of the idea of the end of ideologies and of a unique economic reality whose laws were, like in the past, purely natural. In this context, human beings gradually started to be considered alien to nature, or even its worst enemies.

5However, when all of this takes place in the academic context and in a period of growing intellectual and scientific production, the field for individual thought may be reduced. Or else it may be very difficult for someone to deal with certain issues when there is the belief that they have already been thoroughly explored, or that they have been given up, as if they really did not matter. In any case, they could be considered a subjective perception endorsed by scarce financial resources to research these topics in a world riddled with more concrete needs to fulfill. A context in which it would be more profitable to focus all of one’s efforts on getting some immediate personal advantage.

6Anyway, facts speak for themselves. And it was thus clear that development promises were overridden by the problems and failures deriving from it, though also marked out by successful instances. When this is the case, it is almost inevitable – or so it has been for me – to try to find out the causes. But doing so from a perspective different from the dominating ones is a real challenge. On the one hand, it is hard to prove that what one means to show has not been explained by someone else already. On the other, it is not easy to fight against one’s own fear of sounding arrogant, naïve or ignorant, for there is something about all this in every human being, as my own and others’ experience has taught me.

7In my case, it was the close contact with communities of people living in poor or marginal urban areas that first gave me food for thought and gradually led me to a new look into the question of development and its future. That triggered my first intuitions, based on people’s stories of what they were looking for when their families migrated from the countryside into the cities, what it is they found at some point in their lives, what their labor insertion turned out to be like, what their present scenario was, as well as that of their children and grandchildren.

8Thus, towards the mid nineteen nineties, I simply tried to find some empirical evidence to link urbanization processes with growth dynamics as interactive phenomena, in which the construction of the cities and of their infrastructure played an important explanatory role: in its initial stages it enabled many people’s progress, and in subsequent ones, it became a gradually growing structural problem. That would partly explain specific poor and marginal situations with trans-generational effects. In my first works I only managed to show some correlations or outline the idea that urbanization and growth processes were linked in a way different from what the literature on the topic revealed. Towards the year 2000, I had managed to formulate these hypotheses in a more articulated way, and the first review of my work by a publisher encouraged me to correct that attempt for, somehow, the approach seemed at least original and had not been dealt with in that way by anyone else to date.

9The second landmark was in 2001, when, after the 9/11 attacks in New York, for the first time it became evident that the world was going through a global crisis, which seemed different from the previous ones. This, together with a careful reading of Samuel P. Huntington’s work, led me to write an essay in which I suggested that a change of era was ahead, still based on the link between urbanization, growth and technological change. At the same time, as a keen reader of different topics, I went into a critique of the way of approaching certain philosophical and epistemological questions that had naturalized science as a superior form of knowledge, permeating non-scientific spheres of thought and thus generating popular values and beliefs that could become a cultural hindrance to the construction of a better world. There I outlined the fact that, after China and India’s industrialization processes, there could be another major crisis starting as of 2009 approximately.

10Yet, in none of those works did I manage to delve into the relation between urbanization and economic growth on the one hand, and between the creation of wealth as flow and as stock on the other. That is, I could not yet find a key difference between developed nations and the rest, which would enable me to make a qualitative leap forward in my own economic theory and analysis. Nor did I relate those topics to other dimensions of development, or carry out an extensive bibliographic review. The boom of world economy between 2003 and 2007 was somehow perceived in those pioneering works as a prelude to the change of era, but I could now come up with many challenging proposals that could form part of the world debate at the time. It was after the careful reading of highly influential works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), and Daron Acemoğlu & James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (2012) that I was able to suggest a more thorough and original approach of my own ideas.

11This work is precisely an attempt to overcome the limitations in my previous research. I mean to review what has happened for more than six decades on a global scale, in the hope of contributing new data, hypotheses and reflections on sustainable development in our time.