A review by
Carroll Quigley in The American Economic
Review, June 1963,
of a book:
A PRIMER OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT,
by Robert J. Alexander.
New York: Macmillan
Company, 1962
A Primer of Economic Development.
By ROBERT
J. ALEXANDER.
New
York; Macmillan Company, 1962. pp. 218. $5.00.
Professor Alexander, from a wide experience in the Latin American field,
offers us here a brief, lucid, and elementary guide on how our economic
system, with a few slight modifications, might be applied to
underdeveloped countries. "Underdevelopment" is defined (p. 6) in terms
of seven criteria: low per capita real income; an "unbalanced" economy;
natural resources not exploited for local benefits; a traditional,
rather than a market, economy; production based on labor rather than
capital; structural underemployment; and a local belief that the area is
underdeveloped. It is clear, however, from the statement (p. 5) that
Australia and New Zealand "may correctly be considered as
underdeveloped" that the salient characteristics of this status, in the
author's opinion, are the existence of what he calls an "unbalanced"
(that is, colonial) economy and of the familiar discontent of rising
expectations.
On this basis, ten brief chapters consider how an
economy, similar to our own (even in its possession of democracy, trade
unions, social legislation, and free choice) can be established in
underdeveloped areas. The chief topics are the familiar ones of
industrialization, agricultural reform, capital accumulation, foreign
aid and borrowing, lack of entrepreneurial and managerial skills, and
labor problems. Alexander's point of view is entirely that of
old-fashioned, pre-Keynesian, elementary economic theory with only two
significant exceptions: (1) his rejection of the "law" of comparative
advantage, and (2) his emphasis on the accumulation of capital locally
by state action rather than from private savings.
The clarity, simplicity, and ethnocentricity of this book give it an
immediate appeal. In fact, much discussion in Washington on the subject
of underdevelopment has been expressed, far less well it is true, from
Alexander's point of view. This is unfortunate because these ideas
have, in my opinion, little relevance to the real problems in
development. Their irrelevance appears so clearly in this book for the
very reason that the ideas are presented so lucidly and simply.
The basic errors here are four in number: (1) the assumption that we are
dealing with a dual situation (developed states and underdeveloped
states) instead of a triple one (developed societies, traditional
societies, and the area of mutual reaction between these); (2) the
effort to advise and operate in terms of political units rather than
areas or regions; (3) the effort to deal with problems arising from the
interaction between developed and traditional societies in narrow
economic terms rather than in terms of total acculturation; and (4) the
assumption that the economic contribution to the accultural problem lies
in export of our economic patterns with only that minimum of
modification which seems absolutely unavoidable to our own ethnocentric
vision.
In this context, traditional societies have no problems. Problems arise
only when the impact of developed societies disrupts the patterns of
thought, feeling, and action in a traditional society so that it can no
longer function adequately or, in many cases, even survive. Alexander is
perfectly right in his emphasis on discontent (or rising expectations)
and on "unbalanced" economies, for these are characteristics of
acculturation and not of traditional (that is, really underdeveloped)
societies, but he is mistaken in believing that anything can be done
about such problems of acculturation without deep understanding of the
nature of the traditional societies themselves. And he is totally wrong
if he believes that our patterns of behavior, even in the relatively
narrow field of economics, can be exported to them with only slight
modifications. This is impossible because the operational context in the
acculturative process is (because of the nature of traditional
societies) totally unfitted for our economic patterns.
For example, Alexander assumes that the discontent and rising
expectations of native peoples are similar to our own and that they are,
in economic matters, expressible in terms of our ideas of standards of
living. Our whole economy is based on largely unconscious assumptions of
future preference and infinitely expansible material demands. Most
native peoples have outlooks, based on present preference and, most
non-Christian areas, especially Africa, have little idea of a
future. Many African languages have no future tense and must use the
present tense with a circumlocution to speak of the future. This reveals
minds totally unadapted to planning, capital accumulation, progressive
training, or even steady work habits. Many native peoples have little
conception of individualism (including individual choice,
responsibility, or initiative) and are almost totally absorbed in
family, tribe, or local groups. The expectations of middle class
Americans can be listed largely as material (and thus marketable)
desires. The expectations of rising standards of living among most
Africans would be food; social activities including music, dancing, and
sex-play; leisure; a bicycle or, for a, woman, possibly a sewing
machine. Our Puritan outlook may condemn this as shiftless, but we
should recognize that our economic system rests, to a great extent, on
our Puritan heritage and cannot be exported to people who lack that
heritage.
The
priority of food in the rising expectations of most native peoples and
the pressing need to increase food in the face of growing populations
make agriculture the most urgent problem in any development scheme. But
in agriculture, above all, we have little idea of what to do. U.S.
agriculture looks like the most successful in the world; it arose in a
context of cheap land and expensive labor, and sought high output per
man-hour through labor-saving devices. Most underdeveloped areas have
surplus labor and scarcity of land. Our agriculture, developed on
temperate, glacial soils, with rain in all four seasons, has little to
offer to underdeveloped, tropical, sun-created soils with seasonal rains
and high ultra-violet radiations. The billion dollar fiasco of the
Tanganyika ground-nut scheme of 15 years ago is a case in point.
Quite different, but equally powerful, obstacles exist in Latin America
(see Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life;
Boston, 1952).
The
unrealistic character of this book, even in the area Alexander knows
best, can be seen by comparing it with such recent works, from the
accultural point of view, as George M. Foster's
Traditional Cultures and the Impact of
Technological Change or Charles J.
Erasmus' Man Takes Control: Cultural
Development and American Aid. In fact,
this work ignores things which are perfectly clear in earlier volumes
from this same author. For example, he is fully aware, in other books,
of the role played by armed forces in Latin American life. Yet here he
ignores completely the vital problem of weapon control as part of the
context within which economic development must operate. For example, he
suggests (quite mistakenly) that agrarian reform (breaking up large
estates) is a necessary condition for increased agricultural production
(pp. 70-75) and suggests taxation up to 100 per cent of uncultivated
large estates, but he does not consider for a moment that the success of
this depends on who controls the local armed forces (as was shown so
clearly in Spain in 1936-39). Alexander is prepared to ignore
weapons and politics here, apparently because he considers them less
fundamental than economics; but really they are more fundamental, for no
development program can operate without political order which, in turn,
is largely a question of weapon control (see, for example, Edwin Lieuwen,
Arms and Politics in Latin America). The
Congo's economic collapse is still too close for any of us to ignore the
role of political stability and weapons in economic development, even in
a primer on the subject.
CARROLL QUIGLEY
School of
Foreign Service
Georgetown
University
