They Didn’t See It Coming: Prosperity

As I have stated before, historians are often influenced by what’s going on around them when they write about the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the newly-independent countries looked as though they might experience  their own industrial revolutions. That led to an interest among historians in the early Industrial Revolution. [1]

Economists caught the enthusiasm, too. They viewed the great potential of these countries and expected an Industrial Revolution—what W. W. Rostow called these countires’ “take-off.” [2] But that period  of enthusiasm was followed by disillusionment. It turned out that many countries failed to achieve the take-off that seemed right at their doorstep.

I suggest that the economists were looking at the wrong things.

More than 20 years ago in an article for  the Journal of Private Enterprise [3] I wrote about  economists’ views of development as reflected in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook.  (That’s the one you probably  read in your first economics class if you are of a certain age.)

I looked at Samuelson’s treatment of international development in four editions of the textbook, 1951, 1961, 1964, 1985. In them he reveals both his own views and those of other leading development economists.

In the 1961 edition, optimism for growth still reigned. Continue reading “They Didn’t See It Coming: Prosperity”