| Just as Jane Kelsey's illuminating study of "the
New Zealand Experiment" was about to appear, the Royal Institute of
International Affairs in London published the 75th Anniversary issue
of its journal International Affairs, with survey articles on
major issues of the day. One is devoted to "experiments" of the kind
to which New Zealand is subjecting itself, and their intellectual
roots. The author, Paul Krugman, is a leading figure in international
and development economics. He makes five central points, quite
pertinent in this context.
His first point is that knowledge about economic development is
very limited. Much of economic growth has to be attributed to the
"residual" -- "the measure of our ignorance," as Robert Solow calls
it. In the best studied case, the United States, two-thirds of the
rise in per capita income falls within this category. Similarly, the
Asian NICs provide "no obvious lessons," having followed "varied and
ambiguous" paths that surely do not conform to what "current orthodoxy
says are the key to growth." Krugman recommends "humility" in the face
of the limits of understanding, and caution about "sweeping
generalizations."
Krugman's second point is that, nevertheless, sweeping
generalizations are constantly offered by policy intellectuals and
planners (including many economists). Furthermore, they provide the
doctrinal support for policies that are implemented, when
circumstances allow.
Third, the "conventional wisdom" is unstable, regularly shifting to
something else, perhaps the opposite of the latest phase -- though its
proponents are again brimming with confidence as they impose the new
orthodoxy.
Fourth, it is commonly agreed in retrospect that the policies
didn't "serve their expressed goal" and were based on "bad ideas."
Finally, it is usually "argued that bad ideas flourish because they
are in the interest of powerful groups. Without doubt that happens..."
(1)
That it happens has been a commonplace at least since Adam Smith
condemned the mercantilist theories designed in the interests of the
"merchants and manufacturers" who were "the principal architects" of
Britain's policies, mobilizing state power to ensure that their own
interests were "most peculiarly attended to" however "grievous" the
impact on others, including the people of England. It not only
happens, but does so with impressive consistency. Today's "New Zealand
Experiment" breaks no new ground when "the benefits [of the policies]
rapidly accrued to the corporate sector" that had the
"manifest...strategic influence" in their design, and "political
actors stack the deck in favour of constituents who are intended
beneficiaries" (Kelsey, 8, 72-3).
That is the heart of the matter, and I think it calls for some
restatement of Krugman's conclusions. The "bad ideas" may not serve
the "expressed goal," but they typically turn out to be very good
ideas for their proponents. There have been quite a few experiments in
economic development in the modern era, and though it is doubtless
wise to be wary of sweeping generalizations, still they do exhibit
some regularities that are hard to ignore. One is that the designers
seem to come out quite well, though the experimental subjects, who
rarely sign consent forms, quite often take a beating.
The first such experiment was carried out shortly after Smith
wrote, when the British rulers in India instituted the "permanent
settlement" of 1793, which was going to do wondrous things. The
results were reviewed by a British Enquiry Commission 40 years later.
It concluded that "The settlement fashioned with great care and
deliberation has to our painful knowledge subjected almost the whole
of the lower classes to most grievous oppression," leaving "misery"
that "hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce," the
director of the Honorable Company added, as "the bones of the
cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India."
But the experiment can hardly be written off as a failure.
Governor-General Lord Bentinck noted that "the 'Permanent Settlement,'
though a failure in many other respects and in most important
essentials, has this great advantage, at least, of having created a
vast body of rich landed proprietors deeply interested in the
continuance of the British Dominion and having complete command over
the mass of the people," whose growing misery is therefore less of a
problem than it might have been. British investors didn't lose out
either. Apart from the enormous wealth that flowed to individuals and
companies, India was soon financing 40% of Britain's trade deficit
while providing a protected market for its manufacturing exports;
contract laborers for British possessions from the Caribbean, to
Africa, to Ceylon and Malaysia "replacing earlier slave populations,"
the Cambridge Economic History of India notes; troops for Britain's
colonial and European wars; and the opium that was the staple of
Britain's exports to China -- not quite by the operations of the free
market, just as the sacred principles were overlooked when the useful
substance was barred from England. (2)
In brief, the first great experiment was a "bad idea" for the
subjects, but not for the designers and local elites associated with
them. That coincidence has recurred with curious regularity until the
present day. The consistency of the record is no less impressive than
the flights of rhetoric hailing the latest "showcase for democracy and
capitalism" and "testing area for scientific methods of development"
as a remarkable "economic miracle" -- and the consistency of what the
rhetoric conceals.
The most recent example is Mexico. It was highly praised for its
strict observance of the rules of the "Washington consensus" that
guides the thinking of New Zealand's technocrats, and offered with
pride as a model for others as wages collapsed, the poverty rate rose
almost as fast as the number of billionaires, foreign capital flowed
in (mostly speculative, or for exploitation of super-cheap labor kept
under control by the brutal "democracy"), and the other familiar
concomitants of "showcases" and "miracles." Also familiar is the
denouement, the collapse of the house of cards in December 1994, as
had been predicted by observers who chose not to watch what was
happening through the distorting prism of the "bad ideas" that
"flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups."
-2-
The historical record offers some further lessons. In the 18th
century, the differences between the First and Third World were far
less sharp than they are today. Two obvious questions arise:
(1) Which countries developed, and which not?
(2) Can we identify some operative factors?
The answer to the first question is fairly clear. Outside of
Western Europe, two regions developed: the U.S. and Japan -- that is,
the two regions that managed to escape European colonization. Japan's
colonies are another case, in no small part because Japan, though a
brutal ruler, did not rob its colonies but developed them, at about
the same rate as Japan itself.
What about Eastern Europe? In the 15th century, Europe began to
divide, the West developing and the East becoming its service area,
the original Third World. The divisions deepened into early in this
century, when Russia extricated itself from the system. Despite
Stalin's awesome atrocities and the huge destruction of the two World
Wars, the USSR did undergo significant industrialization, as did its
satellites. It is the "Second World," not part of the Third World --
or was, until 1989. Into the early 1960s, the documentary record
reveals, the great fear of Western planners was that its economic
growth would allow it to catch up with the West and that the
"demonstration effect" would induce others to pursue a course of
"economic nationalism." With the Cold War over, most of Eastern Europe
is returning to the status quo ante: regions that were part of the
industrial West are regaining that status, while typical Third World
structures are being restored in the traditional service areas.
The world is more complicated than any simple description, but this
is a pretty good first approximation, which tells us more about the
question at hand, and also about the Cold War. What it suggests is
supported by the observation that, although John F. Kennedy's
"monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" dedicated to world conquest is
now a fading memory, the Pentagon budget remains at normal Cold War
levels and is now increasing, facts that help a rational person to
draw some conclusions about the role of the Soviet threat in the
thinking of planners; and Washington's international policies have
undergone little more than tactical adjustment and rhetorical revision
now that past pretexts can no longer be reflexively dusted off the
shelf when needed, more facts that help a rational person gain some
understanding of the nature of the Cold War.
Returning to question (1), it seems that development has been
contingent on freedom from "experiments" based on the "bad ideas" that
were very good ideas for the designers and their collaborators. The
ability to fend off such measures does not guarantee economic
development, but does seem to have been a prerequisite for it.
Let's turn to question (2). How did Europe and those who escaped
its clutches succeed in developing? Part of the answer seems
exceptionless: By radically violating approved free market doctrine.
That conclusion holds from England to the East Asian growth area
today, surely including the United States, "the mother country and
bastion of modern protectionism," economic historian Paul Bairoch
observes in his recent study of myths concerning economic development.
The most extraordinary of these, he concludes, is the belief that
protectionism impedes growth: "It is difficult to find another case
where the facts so contradict a dominant theory," a conclusion
supported by many other studies. (3)
-3-
Reviewing their programs of economic development after World War
II, a group of prominent Japanese economists point out that they
rejected the neoclassical economic counsel of their advisers, choosing
instead, the editor observes, a form of industrial policy that
assigned a predominant role to the state, a system that is "rather
similar to the organization of the industrial bureaucracy in socialist
countries and seems to have no direct counterpart in the other
advanced Western countries" (Tokyo University economist Ryutaro
Komiya). "The 'ideology' of industrial policy during this [early
postwar] period was not based on neoclassical economics or Keynesian
thinking, but was rather neomercantilist in lineage," one contributor
adds, and "also was distinctly influenced by Marxism." Market
mechanisms were gradually introduced by the state bureaucracy and
industrial-financial conglomerates as prospects for commercial success
increased. The defiance of orthodox economic precepts was a condition
for the Japanese miracle, the economists conclude.
Turning to Japan's former colonies, the first extensive study of
the U.S. Aid mission in Taiwan discovered that the U.S. advisers and
Chinese planners, "although versed in Anglo-American economics,"
disregarded the doctrines and the orders from Washington. The U.S.
technical experts in Taiwan chose "to jettison free-market nostrums
from the start and collaborate with Chinese officials" in developing a
"state-centered strategy," as Taiwan resumed the development of the
colonial period. Policy was based on the principle, which still holds,
that it must "depend upon the active participation of the government
in the economic activities of the island through deliberate plans and
its supervision of their execution" (K.Y. Win, 1953). Meanwhile U.S.
officials were "advertising Taiwan as a private enterprise success
story," much as the World Bank does today with increasing desperation
while analysts concerned with the facts detail the crucial and
continuing role of the "entrepreneurial state," functioning
differently from South Korea but with no less of a guiding hand. (4)
The central role of state management and initiative in
late-developing economies has been well known since the work of
Alexander Gerschenkron; it need only be added that the same is true
from the earliest moments of the industrial revolution. In these
domains, few propositions seem as well-founded empirically.
An ancillary question is how the Third World became what it is
today. Bairoch provides a plausible if partial answer: "There is no
doubt that the Third World's compulsory economic liberalism in the
nineteenth century is a major element in explaining the delay in its
industrialization," and, in the dramatic and very revealing case of
India, the "process of de-industrialization" that converted the
industrial workshop and trading center of the world to a deeply
impoverished agricultural society, suffering a sharp decline in real
wages, food consumption, and availability of other simple commodities
from the 18th century, a "misfortune [that] is unprecedented in the
world's economic history," the most detailed modern study concludes.
(5)
-4-
"India was only the first major casualty in a very long list,"
Bairoch observes, including "even politically independent Third World
countries [that] were forced to open their markets to Western
products." Meanwhile Western societies protected themselves from
market discipline, and developed -- with correlations to market
interference that are not easy to disregard, as Bairoch and others
observe.
Putting the details aside, it seems fairly clear that one reason
for the sharp divide between today's First and Third World is that
much of the latter was subjected to "experiments" that rammed free
market doctrine down their throats, while today's developed countries
were able to resist such measures.
That brings us to another feature of modern history that is hard to
miss, in this case at the ideological level. Free market doctrine
comes in two varieties. The first is the official doctrine that is
taught to and by the educated classes, and imposed on the defenceless.
The second is what we might call "really existing free market
doctrine": For thee, but not for me, except for temporary advantage; I
need the protection of the nanny state, but you must learn
responsibility under the harsh regimen of "tough love." Those in a
position to make choices typically adopt the second version of free
market doctrine, the one that has been a prerequisite to development,
so the historical record suggests, though not a sufficient condition
for it.
Pursuing the inquiry further, we quickly discover that the effects
of state intervention in the economy are much underestimated in
standard accounts, which focus narrowly on such special cases as
protectionism. The category is far broader.
To select one obvious case, the early industrial revolution relied
on cheap cotton. It was not exactly kept cheap and available by
worship of the market. Rather, by the expulsion or extermination of
the indigenous population of the American south along with slavery,
later a near functional equivalent. There were, furthermore, other
cotton producers at the time. Prominent among them was India, under
colonial rule, so that its resources flowed to England while its own
considerably more advanced textile industry was destroyed by the harsh
and self-conscious application of "really existing free market
doctrine." Another case is Egypt, which was initiating industrial
development at the same time as America's New England, but was barred
from that course by British force -- on the quite explicit grounds
that Britain would brook no competition or independent development.
New England, in contrast, was able to follow the path of the mother
country, barring cheaper British textiles by very high tariffs, as
Britain had done to India. Without such measures, half of the emerging
textile industry of New England would have been destroyed, the sole
inquiry into the topic by an economic historian concludes, with the
obvious effects on the many industrial spin-offs. (6)
It is curious that the central question of American economic
history seems to be virtually off the agenda, apparently regarded as
"politically incorrect."
To be sure, Britain did finally turn to liberal internationalism --
in 1846, after 150 years of protectionism, violence, and creation of a
strong and efficient state had enabled it to gain more than twice the
per capita industrialization of any competitor, so that a "level
playing field" looked fairly safe. By 1846, India exported no cotton
goods at all, and had to import cloth from England, over four times as
much as 10 years earlier. England had, at last, become pre-eminent in
textile production, having succeeded in de-industrializing India by
force. "It is striking," Mukerjee observes, "that English economists
and statesmen became adherents of the doctrine of free trade as the
surest way to the wealth of nations after the rise of the Lancashire
cotton industry through the tariff and prohibition against French
goods, Irish woollen goods and Indian silk and cotton imports." The
measures that Britain undertook were extreme, going well beyond
extremely high protective tariffs. The contention of ideologues that
Adam Smith "convinced England of the merits of free international
trade" (George Stigler, Nobel laureate in economics of the University
of Chicago) cannot withstand even the slightest exposure to empirical
fact. (7)
-5-
In 1846, Britain did finally turn to liberal internationalism,
though not without significant reservations. Thus 40% of British
textiles continued to go to colonized India, and much the same was
true of British exports generally. In the latter part of the 19th
century, British steel was blocked from U.S. markets by very high
tariffs that enabled the U.S. to develop its own steel industry; the
noted pacifist Andrew Carnegie was able to construct the world's first
billion dollar corporation thanks to high tariffs, naval contracts,
and resort to state violence to block labor organization and impose
virtual tyranny on manufacturing towns. But India and other colonies
were still available, as they were when British steel was later priced
out of international markets. India again is a particularly
interesting case; it produced as much iron as all of Europe in the
late 18th century, British engineers were still studying Indian steel
manufacturing techniques in 1820 "in order to help English steel
makers close the technological gap with India," a Harvard military
historian observes, and Bombay was producing locomotives at
competitive levels when the railway boom began. But "really existing
free market doctrine" destroyed these sectors of Indian industry just
as it demolished India's textile industry, along with its advanced
ship-building industry and others that had made it the world's leading
center of manufacture before the British takeover. The United States
and Japan, in contrast, could adopt Britain's model of radical
violation of market principles. And when Japanese competition proved
to be too much to handle, England simply called off the game: the
empire was effectively closed to Japanese exports, one significant
part of the background of World War II in the Pacific. Indian
manufacturers asked for protection at the same time -- but against
England, not Japan. No such luck, under really existing free market
doctrine. (8)
A century after England turned to liberal internationalism --
temporarily, and with reservations -- the United States followed the
same course, for much the same reasons. By 1945, after 150 years of
extreme protectionism, violence, and formation of an efficient
developmental state, the U.S. had become by far the richest and most
powerful country in the world, and like England before it, suddenly
came to perceive the merits of liberal internationalism on a "level
playing field." But, again, with crucial reservations.
One was that, like Britain, Washington used its power to bar
independent development elsewhere. Latin America was permitted
"complementary" but not "competitive" development, a harsh condition
imposed upon this "testing area for scientific methods of development"
in accord with "American capitalism." Aid to newly-independent Egypt
and (in complex ways) India was conditioned on similar principles.
Attempts to violate the rules have often elicited extreme violence,
under Cold War pretexts when they were available, others when they
were not.
Another crucial reservation was (and remains) domestic. One
fundamental component of free trade theory is that public subsidies
are disallowed. But the American business world and leading economists
expected a return to the Great Depression when pent-up consumer demand
from the war was exhausted and business leaders were aware that
advanced industry "cannot satisfactorily exist in a pure, competitive,
unsubsidized, 'free enterprise' economy" and that "the government is
their only possible saviour" (Fortune, Business Week).
Business leaders quickly settled on the Pentagon system as the optimal
device to impose the costs on the public while profits are privatized,
for sensible reasons. It was understood that social spending could
play the same stimulative role, but it is not a direct subsidy to the
high tech corporate sector, and it has inherent unwelcome features.
Social spending has democratizing effects: people have opinions about
where a hospital or school should be, but not about air defence
systems that lay the groundwork for commercial computers. And social
spending tends to be redistributive. Military spending has none of
these defects, and is also easy to sell, at least, as long as
democratic forms can be deprived of substance by deceit and
manipulation. Truman's Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington put the
matter forthrightly in January 1948: "The word to talk was not
'subsidy'; the word to talk was 'security'." As industry
representative in Washington, he regularly demanded enough procurement
funds in the military budget to "meet the requirements of the aircraft
industry," as he put it. One consequence is that "civilian aircraft"
is now the country's leading export, and the huge travel and tourism
industry, aircraft-based, is the source of major profits and a hefty
favorable trade balance in services. The same pattern prevails in
computers, electronics generally, metallurgy, biotechnology,
telecommunications and information processing, in fact just about
every dynamic sector of the economy.
-6-
It is a bit hard to keep a straight face when "evangelical
libertarian intellectuals and free-market economists" praise the
"conservative free-market governments in the U.S. and elsewhere,"
admiring "Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire" (Kelsey, 10, 17, 19). Such
posturing may pass in the doctrinal institutions, but would simply
elicit ridicule in the corridors of power, corporate or state.
The story continues to the present. There was no need to explain
"really existing free market doctrine" to the Reaganites, who were
masters at the art, extolling the glories of the market to the poor at
home and the service areas abroad while boasting proudly to the
business world that Reagan had "granted more import relief to U.S.
industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century"
(Secretary of Treasury James Baker, who was far too modest; in fact,
it was more than all predecessors combined, as the Reaganites doubled
import restrictions). Meanwhile the administration stepped up the
transfer of public funds to private power, primarily through the
Pentagon system. Had these extreme measures of market violation not
been pursued, it is doubtful that such central sectors of industry as
steel, automotive, machine tools, or semiconductors would have
survived Japanese competition, or been able to forge ahead in emerging
technologies, with widely proliferating effects through the economy.
That experience illustrates once again that "the conventional wisdom"
is "full of holes," Alan Tonelson points out in reviewing the
Reaganite record of market interference in Foreign Affairs. But
the conventional wisdom retains its virtues as an ideological weapon
to discipline the defenseless. (9)
There is also no need to explain the doctrines to the leader of
today's "conservative revolution" in Washington, Newt Gingrich, who
sternly lectures 7-year old children on the evils of welfare
dependency while winning the national prize in bringing federal
subsidies to his rich constituents, thanks to such paragons of free
enterprise as Lockheed, the major employer in his district, and others
like it. Or to the Heritage Foundation, which crafts the budget
proposals for the congressional "conservatives," and therefore called
for (and obtained) an increase in the Pentagon budget beyond Clinton's
increase to ensure that the "defense industrial base" remains solid,
protected by the nanny state and offering dual-use technology to its
beneficiaries, to enable them to dominate commercial markets.
Clinton's expansion of the Pentagon budget, quickly topped by the
congressional "libertarians," was his immediate response to the
"popular mandate for conservatism" in November 1994, and was supported
by an overwhelming one-sixth of the population.
But all understand very well that democracy is a nuisance to be
ignored as long as possible, and that free enterprise means that the
public pays the costs under various guises, bearing the risks if
things go wrong, while profit is privatized. And in pursuit of these
ends, decision-making is to be transferred as much as possible from
the public arena to unaccountable private tyrannies, and "locked in"
by treaties that undermine the potential threat of democracy.
-7-
New Zealand's Law Commission is on target in observing that a
crucial feature of the international trade treaties is that they
"limit in substance the power of the New Zealand Parliament" (Kelsey,
104). That is a good part of their function. In the United States, it
is no longer possible to produce the euphoric predictions about the
benefits that NAFTA will surely bring, so it is now tacitly conceded
by sophisticated elites that the advocates of NAFTA were lying all
along. The Clinton administration "forgot that the underlying purpose
of NAFTA was not to promote trade but to cement Mexico's economic
reforms," Newsweek correspondent Marc Levinson loftily declares
in Foreign Affairs, failing only to add that the contrary was
loudly claimed to ensure the passage of NAFTA, while the critics who
emphasized this "underlying purpose" were efficiently excluded from
the debate. (10)
The main goal of NAFTA, we can now concede, was not to achieve the
highly touted wonders of "trade" and "jobs," always illusion, but to
ensure that Mexico would be "locked in" to the "reforms" that had made
it an "economic miracle" (for U.S. investors and Mexican elites),
deflecting the danger detected by a Latin America Strategy Development
Workshop at the Pentagon in September 1990: that "a 'democracy
opening' in Mexico could test the special relationship by bringing
into office a government more interested in challenging the U.S. on
economic and nationalist grounds." Despite the rich variety of means
available to deter the threat of democracy, the powerful cannot be
certain that the plague may not break out somewhere.
Of course, the United States is not alone in its conceptions of
"free trade," even if its ideologues lead the cynical chorus. The
doubling of the gap between rich and poor countries from 1960 is
substantially attributable to protectionist measures of the rich, the
UN Development Report concluded in 1992. The practices persist through
the Uruguay Round, the 1994 UNDP report observes, concluding that "the
industrial countries, by violating the principles of free trade, are
costing the developing countries an estimated $50 billion a year --
nearly equal to the total flow of foreign assistance" -- much of it
publicly-subsidized export promotion. (11)
To illustrate with a different measure, a recent study of the top
100 transnationals in the Fortune list found that "virtually
all appeared to have sought and gained from industrial and/or trade
policies [of their home government] at some point," and "at least
20...would not have survived as independent companies if they had not
been saved in some way by their governments." One is Gingrich's
favorite cash cow, Lockheed, saved from collapse by $2 billion federal
loan guarantees provided by the Nixon administration. Again, New
Zealand breaks no new ground as its libertarians bail out Electricorp
when it gets in trouble. (12)
There is a great deal more to say about these matters, but some
conclusions seem fairly clear: as in the days of Smith and later
Ricardo, the approved doctrines are carefully crafted and employed for
reasons of power and profit. There is no new departure when the "New
Zealand experiment" takes the form of "socialism for the rich" as part
of the international "triumph of the market" based on a system of
global corporate mercantilism in which "trade" consists in substantial
measure of centrally-managed intrafirm transactions and interactions
among huge institutions, totalitarian in essence, designed to
undermine democratic decision-making and to safeguard the masters from
market discipline; a system in which "Oligopolistic competition and
strategic interaction among firms and governments rather than the
invisible hand of market forces condition today's competitive
advantage and international division of labor in high-technology
industries" (OECD, 1992). It is the poor and defenseless who are to be
instructed in the stern doctrines of market discipline.
-8-
From the origins of the industrial revolution, there have been
repeated efforts to implement within the industrial societies
themselves the kinds of "experiments" imposed elsewhere, but with only
limited success. The first was in England in the early 19th century,
when the doctrines of "neoliberalism" were forged as an instrument of
class warfare: specifically, the doctrine that one only harms the poor
by efforts to help them, and that people have no rights other than
what they can gain in the labor market, contrary to the mistaken
assumptions of pre-capitalist society, which upheld a misguided "right
to live." Those who cannot survive under harsh market discipline may
enter the workhouse-prison, or preferably, go somewhere else -- not
impossible in those days, as North America and parts of the Pacific
were being cleared of the native scourge. These are virtual laws of
nature, Ricardo and others solemnly explained, as certain as the
principle of gravitation.
With the triumph of right thinking at the service of British
manufacturing and financial interests, the people of England were
"forced into the paths of a utopian experiment," Karl Polanyi wrote in
classic work, the most "ruthless act of social reform" in all of
history, which "crushed multitudes of lives." But a problem arose. The
stupid masses, unable to comprehend the compelling logic of the
science, began to draw the conclusion that if we have no right to
live, then you have no right to rule. The British army had to cope
with riots and disorder, and soon an even greater threat took shape:
"factory laws and social legislation, and a political and industrial
working class movement sprang into being...to stave off the entirely
new dangers of the market mechanism." Chartism and socialist
organizing posed even greater terrors. The science, which is
fortunately supple, took new forms as elite opinion shifted in
response to uncontrollable popular forces, discovering that the "right
to live" had to be preserved under a social contract of sorts.
That story too has been repeated over the years, in the United
States as well, and in other industrializing societies. Today the
social contract that has been gained by popular struggle is once again
under attack, primarily in the Anglo-American societies. That is one
aspect of what the business press calls "capital's clear subjugation
of labor...for the past 15 years." (13)
The new experiments, as always, are accompanied by confident
proclamations, which merit all the respect they deserved in the past.
Recalling again how little is understood, one has to evaluate with
care and caution the "neoliberal economies and philosophy [that have]
dominated intellectual discourse, radiating out primarily from the
United States" (Kelsey, 17), with due attention to the rationale of
the argument (such as it is) and to the lessons of past and present
history -- among them, the cynicism of the intellectual discourse
intended to veil "really existing free market doctrine." It makes
little sense to ask what is "right" for the United States (or India,
or New Zealand,...) as if these were entities with shared interests
and values. Within the realm of practical choice, that is rarely true.
And what may be right for people in the United States, given their
unparalleled advantages, could well be wrong for others who have a
much narrower scope of choices, which have to be made in the light of
particular historical and socio-cultural contingencies. We can,
however, reasonably anticipate that what is right for the people of
the United States (or India, or New Zealand,...) will only by the
remotest accident conform to what is preferred by the "principal
architects of policy," for much the reasons that Adam Smith understood
very well.
Endnotes
(1) Krugman, P. (1995). "Cycles of conventional wisdom on economic
development," Int. Affairs 71.4, October.
(2) For references, see Chomsky, N. (1993) Year 501 Boston,
South End; London, Pluto.
Also: Bayly, C.A. (1988) The New Cambridge History of India
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(3) Bairoch, (1993) Economics and World History Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
For more detail on the U.S. case, see Eckes, A. (1995) Opening
America's Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776 Chapel Hill
& London, U. of North Carolina Press.
(4) Komiya, R. et al., (1988) Industry Policy of Japan
Tokyo, 1984; Academic press,
Cullaher, N. (1996) "The U.S. and Taiwanese Industrial Policy,"
Diplomatic History 20.1,
Wei-ching Wang, V. (1995-96) "Developing the Information Industry in
Taiwan," Pacific Affairs 68.4, Winter.
(5) Mukerjee, R. (1967) The Economic History of India: 1600-1800
Allahabad. See Bayly, op. cit., for a briefer review and
confirmatory evidence.
Rothermund, D. (1993) An Economic History of India London:
Croom Helm, 2nd edition
Chandra, B. (1971) Modern India National Council of Educational
Research and Training, Delhi.
(6) Bils, M. (1984) Journal of Economic History, No. 4.
(7) Stigler, Introduction to the University. of Chicago
bicentennial edition of Smith's Wealth of Nations. On his
misrepresentations of Smith's text, see Year 501.)
(8) see (5) Rosen, S. (1995) "Military Effectiveness,"
International Security 19.4
(9) Tonelson, A. (1994) Foreign Affairs, July/August.
(10) Levinson, M. (1996) Newsweek, FA March/April.
(11) For discussion, see
Toussaint, E. & Drucker, P. eds., (1995) IMF/World Bank/WTO,
Notebooks for Study and Research 24/5, International Institute for
Research and Education, Amsterdam.
(12) Ruigrok, W. (1996) FT, Jan. 5.
McQuaid, K. (1994) Uneasy Partners Baltimore-London, Johns
Hopkins University Press,
(13) Liscio, J. (1996) Barron's, April 15. |