>Brad de Long wrote,
> > Walt Whitman Rostow is a very good development economist and economic
> > historian. But I wouldn't call his tenure as Assistant to the
> > President for National Security a big win...
Tom Walker wrote:
>I wouldn't call Rostow's once canonical _The Stages of Economic Growth_ a
>big win as development economics or economic history, either. There is
>more of a connection between Rostow's facile take-off theory and the
>Westmoreland body-count logic of Viet-Nam War escalation than might appear
>at first sight.
I've been told -- by a well-informed political scientist -- that WW Rostow
believed that Vietnam was "about to make the take-off" during the 1960s.
This "insight" helped shape US military strategy.
I didn't say so, but I don't think that he was a "very good development
economist." In fact, his "non-communist manifesto" isn't true development
economics at all (even though it is studied in development economics)
because he took one data point (his history of the UK's economy) and
generalized it to the whole world. It's worth reading because it's one of
the purest statements of modernism (much purer than Marx, who isn't really
a modernist, since he saw capitalist modernization as a bad thing). He
totally ignored the way in which the countries that have already made the
"take off" take over and run those that haven't done so yet, so that the
latter can't make it (unless they turn very statist, like South Korea). Al
Fishlow (pretty conservative himself) had an excellent critique of Rostow
years ago titled "empty economic stages." Alexander Gershenkron is _much
better_ than Rostow, though as Brenner points out, he got a lot of his
ideas from the Bolsheviks without citing them.
Mike Yates says: >You don't have to take the job. Don't you suppose he got
the job in the first place because of his views, like most other economists
who take gov't jobs. Like the notorious Feldstein, don't you think his
"research" on social security helped make him acceptable to Reagan the
privatizer. You make this all sound so innocent almost. What makes me
think that Rostow and his brother were pretty rotten human beings? By
their acts ye shall know them.<
In general, you're right. I guess Rostow wanted to be a "player" even
before he started working for President Kennedy. He was the kind of "new
entrepreneur" that C. Wright Mills talks about in WHITE COLLAR (an even
better book that THE POWER ELITE, BTW), who rises to the top by moving
between bureaucratic hierarchies, academia, government, and foundations. In
the 1950s, writing a book like THE STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH helped him
rise to the top. And in that system, it's not cream that rises.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il
tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.)
-- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
