New Views on Economic Development
GIDEONSE, HARRY D.
New Views on Economic Development By Harry D. Gideonse President of Brooklyn College No idea has perhaps borne more nefarious fruit in contemporary American foreign policy than the oversimplified...
...Fundamentally...
...By Jonathau B. Bingham...
...Bingham's and Staley's books* are admirable additions to this American literature of rediscovery and supplement each other remarkably well...
...Bingham's colorful, attractive book deals with the actual experience of the U.S...
...Shirt-Slevve Diplomacy—Point 4 in Action...
...John Day...
...New Views on Economic Development By Harry D. Gideonse President of Brooklyn College No idea has perhaps borne more nefarious fruit in contemporary American foreign policy than the oversimplified picture of "colonialism" which "vulgar" Marxism had in common with the orators at Fourth of July celebrations...
...This is by far the best popular, comprehensive discussion of our Point Four program...
...Staley's thesis is that a large program of economic development is really a program to induce an industrial revolution, and that the political and cultural consequences of such a policy can be safeguarded against totalitarian exploitation only by purposeful and planned cultural and political development...
...410 pp...
...4.00...
...Staley's The Future of Underdeveloped Countries is a sorely-needed basic study of the framework for long-term American public policy...
...By Eugene Staley...
...the reader is never allowed to consider programs of economic development without an awareness of the choices in social and moral values to which these economic means might lead...
...303 pp...
...The fashionable drive for industrial development is discussed with sympathy but with an analytical awareness of the danger of confusing increase in industrial output with improvement in living standards...
...This book is the result of a study group of the Council on Foreign Relations, but it is an integrated individual work by an author who was well prepared for this task by his preceding books on international investment and raw materials...
...Point Four" is simply the translation into language that is politically and symbolically acceptable to our time of the idea that Kipling expressed as "the white man's burden...
...The slogan that it was a unilateral form of economic exploitation is disproved daily in Southeast Asia and other formerly dependent territories where a disastrous process of economic dis-investment has accompanied political independence...
...It is simply written in an admirably objective spirit...
...The period of "colonialism" was ?for better or for worse—an effective example of economic and social development...
...There is a continuous comparison of democratic and totalitarian methods of development, and the chapters on Communist distortion of democratic alternatives in China and India are soberly reasoned and carefully documented...
...Is it reasonable to expect such policy objectives to be adopted abroad by the United States Government, which has rather glaringly ignored them at home...
...Staley describes economic development more as a massive problem in human education and social readjustment than as a problem of mechanical skills or equipment, or of inducing a large flow of new dollar investment...
...The new literature on economic development reflects the rediscovery by American public opinion of the basic idea of constructive colonial administration: that economic development calls for a political and social framework in which predictable values and dependable laws are at least as important as the flow of investment...
...The fact that these larger questions are now introduced into the American discussion of public policy is itself evidence of an encouraging reorientation...
...technical-assistance program in recent years, on the basis of his own experience as former Deputy and Acting Administrator of the Technical Cooperation Administration...
...The conscious striving for "international" economic cooperation in our own time has produced less effective economic integration than the world economy that developed spontaneously in the nineteenth century...
...The Future of Underdeveloped Countries...
...Perhaps we may yet understand that it was not merely colonial reaction and imperialism that led European administrators to believe that "the industrial system is not a piece of machinery which can be uncrated and set going successfully in the political and social environments characteristic of pre-industrial society...
...Staley recognizes the appeal of the nationalist-collectivist argument that the Communists "may use rough methods but they are the ones that get things done," but his conclusion that the Communist challenge can be met successfully "if the resources of the West are really brought to bear on the development program" is carefully reasoned...
...Harper...
...5.00...
...Political Implications of Fconoinic Devetopment...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 25
