On 11/3/06, Walt Byars <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Then there is what Gerschenkeron and some institutionalists stress about economic growth not being *that* cumulative. There may be situations in which having lower growth may improve an economy's ability to have higher growth rates.
Gerschenkron presents an improved version of Rostow's stages of economic growth theory. In Walt Whitman Rostow's "non-communist manifesto," the "take off" took us from pre-Newtonian hell to the heaven of mass consumption. Basically, he overgeneralized from the experience of the English industrial revolution (about which he had written a serious book, though it's controversial these days). Gershenkron brought in the competition of nations along with some institutional detail. The later a country develops, the more desperate it is, so that the state is more important in promoting its industrial revolution. England was less statist than Germany which was less statist than Russia, etc. (The next step was the dependency theorists, who brought in the fact that sometimes a country is so "backward" that the imperialist nations prevent it from developing at all, at least not in the way that the rich countries did. And, then there's the anti-dependistas, etc.) -- Jim Devine / "Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
