G'day Brad,
>Walt Whitman Rostow is a very good development economist ...
Not to make a habit of serial disagreements with you (I really do think
you're a good bloke and a good read, even if we get a lot more out of your
web site than we ever do from your carefree one-liners here), but what's so
bloody good about friend Rostow? He of the universalist thesis of
development, the facile 'stages of growth' prescription, the culturally
arrogant 'you, too, can be like us' lie - he of the destruction of millions
of desperately trusting lives! Sheesh!
Even the great god Samuelson mentions him but once (inevitably politely) and
then implicitly tears shreds off this cold-war PR man. I hope his economic
history, of which I know nothing, is more impressive than his 'development'
'economics', which all too many people know all too much about. Everett
Rogers, a salient colleague in his cold-war contest-for-sphere-of-influence
endeavours, took his whole thesis apart in the Winter of 1976 (*Journal of
Communications*), and no-one outside the narrow profession of economics, the
bastard IMF, the bastard World Bank, and the bastard White House has taken
that 'take-off' shite seriously since. The third world can't get 'here'
because (a) we're in the wrong place, (b) we got here only by siphoning the
lifeblood out of them, and (c) our economic dominance has us in the
'value-added' zone (well, you, anyway), and them treading water (eg and ie
the 'green revolution' joke of the early 80s and all of bloody Africa today)
in a stagnant pool of pathetic dependency.
The old bloke has the excuse of having written his most famous book forty
years ago - before experience could teach us that real development, in those
relatively few instances it actually occurred, had nothing to do with the
precepts of the Rostows, the Lerners and the Pyes, and that those economies
most diligently committed to their arrogant pronouncements went backwards
(as far as the vast majority of their populations - the purported object of
the whole exercise - were concerned). But that 'a very good development
economist' hardly makes ...
Looking through the past darkly,
Rob.
