I wrote:
> > In summary, I would say that these countries [Taiwan, S. Korea]
> _combined_ the three options
> > that Wallerstein is quoted as seeing. They developed (1) because Japan,
> > when occupying them, wanted them to be agricultural breadbaskets, which
> > helped their farms feed their urban populations later on, in partial
> > imitation of the European agricultural revolution; (2) because the U.S.
> > wanted to create "showcases" to show the damn commies how wonderful
> > capitalism was (cf. West Berlin) and was even willing to allow their
> > leaders to pursue different development "models" than the U.S. preferred;
> > and (3) because their ruling elites (afraid of the same damn commies
> and of
> > their own people, too) pursued strategies of planned export-led capitalist
> > growth, working hand-in-glove with the biggest businesses while promoting
> > such pro-growth policies as mass education. This last is not the U.S.
> > "model" of development, which was until World War II or so that of
> > import-substituting industrialization (though US free-trade economists are
> > loathe to admit this).
>
>Because, because, because...the point is they industrialized which
>was not supposed to happen.
in the real world (at a low level of abstraction), there are usually
several different causes. (It's called overdetermination.)
Industrialization "was not supposed to happen" according to the unvarnished
and dogmatic version of dependency theory. But like all other valid or
half-valid theories that I know of, that prediction has a major _ceteris
paribus_ clause and therefore is simply pointing to barriers to
"development" that orthodox development theory (including that of some
Marxists) usually misses.
> > The case of Puerto Rico also shows the limitations of judging a country's
> > "development" by looking at aggregate statistics such as real GDP per
> > capita. If you _define_ development in terms of GDP per capita, you're
> > distorting what the goals of development are.
>
>So you're saying the goals of development of capitalism should be
>socialist?!
no, rather it is that we shouldn't use capitalist standards (GDP per
capita, etc.) as our own. Even mainstream development types know that it's
easy to raise GDP per capita by shifting labor from the non-market sector
(where output isn't counted in GDP) to the market sector, though they
usually forget that.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
