Amy goodman interviews manfred max neef biography

Watch part two of this interview here.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now speaks to the acclaimed Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who won the Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Prize) in 1983, two years after the publication of his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics.

Max-Neef explains how he came to understand and conceptualize what barefoot economics is.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: It's a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated in a concrete experience.

I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas in different parts of Latin America. And at the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru.

It was an ugly day.

Manfred max-neef economics unmasked

It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud—not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each othe