Conclusion: Towards a Caring Society

The chapters in this book have traversed a wide area of issues and topics underlying socioeconomic development, with special reference to Malaysia in that country’s towards an industrialised economy by the year 2020 — the Vision 2020. These topics and issues have covered both microeconomic and the macroeconomic perspectives. The chapters have tried to present an alternative framework, particularly as the alternative delineates a world-view that is different from and in contrast to the neo-classical, Keynesian, monetarist, Marxist and post-Keynesian paradigms usually found in the study of the socioeconomic universe. The epistemology of ethics, values, well-being, efficiency, stability and growth — in a simultaneous occurrence of these targets — is found to be foreign to the perspective of development in received mainstream doctrines. Consequently, the institutions, policies, programme and visions of socioeconomic development carried out in the received methodological folds are argued to be alienating between the competing ends of economic preferences and distributive preferences. The embedded methodology of neo-classical substitution principle is found not to enable complementarity between these competing ends. This is found to be true both with and without technological change. Hence, in this sense, the design and meaning of technological change, too, remains to be of an alienating nature.