The work of Celso Furtado as a social thinker is known because of its great contribution to understanding development issues in the context of underdeveloped countries. His theory of underdevelopment, conceived four decades ago, persists as a current vision of reality. Furtado constantly re-examines concepts such as dependency, income concentration, cultural mimetism, asymmetric relations between center and periphery, internal market and many others, in addition to working with a structuralist vision of underdevelopment, development and related phenomena. In his book The Myth of Development, he raises two questions which are not common in the rest of his work. The first deals with the impact of the economic process on the physical medium, on nature _ a subject that is completely strange to the core of traditional thought of economic science. The second refers to the verification of the quality of modern myth of economic development. That Furtado had done this in 1974, the time of the Miracle, demonstrates the vigor of his visionary thought. It is worthwhile revisiting the matter. This article is devoted to such task.
economic development; myth; limits to development; consumption patterns; ecologic costs