The natural trajectory of new truths, says Nobel Economics laureate Amartya Sen, paraphrasing T.H. Huxley, is that they start as her esies and end as superstitions¹ . In this context, the concept of human development may be regarded, in part, as fortunate.

The concept of human development did not escape the habitual scepticism that greets the birth of revolutionary ideas fr om the makers of systematised knowledge - academia.

The Bengali pr ofessor Muhammad Yunus draws an inter esting analogy between the revolutionary idea of the Grameen Bank, aimed essentially at helping the poor, and the advent of the concept of human development. Yunus r emarks that when he ar gued that development also consisted of helping people take care of their basic needs, such as having another meal or a change of clothes, they ridiculed him, and told him, "That is no development… Development is growth of the economy… growth will bring ever ything." And he continues, "We carried out our work as if we wer e engaged in some very undesirable activities. When UNDP’s Human Development Report came
out we felt vindicated"(UNDP, 1999: 15).

In the ten years that have passed since it was first articulated, the concept of human development has not followed Huxley's cycle, that is, it has not turned into a superstition, but it has reinforced itself against the onslaught of the critics, of then and of now, who still think that time will eventually r elegate it to the undignified status of a simple her esy.

The speed with which human development managed to gather the critical mass necessar y to challenge theories
which, at the time of its emergence, had become intellectual fortr esses in articulating the concept of development,
pr oves the worth of an idea that was born at the right time.

The spiritual cradle of the concept of human development was growing discontent with the pr evailing definition of development at the start of the 1970s, which generally gravitated ar ound the Gr oss Domestic Pr oduct (GDP). Part of the discontent ar ose as a challenge to the assumption of the theor y which r educed development to the accumulation of capital, concentrated only in investment, industrialisation and the accumulation of financial capital.

Disagreement with the excessive dependence on GDP as the general measur e of pr ogr ess began to be expressed within some academic sectors and found an echo in multilateral or ganisations such as the Inter national Labour Organisation (ILO), and in developing countries. Itgather ed impetus during the 1980s.

The argument of the new school of thought was not that GDP was completely irrelevant as an indicator of economic
dynamics. The pr oblem, the argument went, lay in escaping fr om counter-productive and simplistic mistakes of the
sort "GDP has gr own, and so we ar e more developed". The ar gument is that in isolation GDP is not a good measure of development, since it is not suf ficiently inclusive in its measur ement of pr osperity. GDP envisages only the quantification of the wealth generated, but neglects important factors such as the distribution of this wealth.

More than this, what concer ned this dissident curr ent was the fact that this indicator does not capture other dimensions , much less expr ess the contribution of aggregate pr oduction in expanding the well-being of individuals, including access to health car e and access to education. Nor does it incorporate other dimensions that
lend quality and dignity to human life.