The Developed and the Developing

...In economics, the practitioners of a second technique enjoy still higher prestige...

...One of Galbraith's most interesting recommendations for developing nations is concentration upon the needs of the average consumer — food, clothing, medical care and education—even if luxury imports are totally embargoed and other imports controlled...

...Another interesting emphasis is upon education...

...Harvard might do worse than present a copy of this book to all American representatives to other countries...

...It would add little to the weight of their luggage and a good deal to their comprehension of economic change...

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Like most other teaching and writing economists, I am a heavy consumer of the new economic literature on economic development...

...Nor does it make sense to stimulate the agricultural output of poor countries if landlords and moneylenders skim off the entire increment...

...The first is the official report...

...Before economic development can take place, the bulk of the population must see the short-run hope of improvement in their own lives...

...E. E. Hagen has drawn upon psychoanalytical technique, W. W. Rostow upon economic history, and still other imaginative writers have drawn upon social psychology and anthropology...

...The success of the plan usually requires substantial alteration of the public policies, private habits and spending attitudes of the government and population of the afflicted nation...

...In the ordinary course of events the recommendations are saluted and forgotten...

...Nor should automatic gates be substituted for human watchmen at railroad crossings in countries where labor is painfully plentiful and alternative employment is negligible...

...Indeed...

...Inevitably, its report includes a series of recommendations, frequently a four-, five- or seven-year plan...

...Galbraith, who embodies in this small, elegant collection of lectures an amazing amount of extremely practical wisdom, takes as his model of investigation none of the popular techniques of his colleagues...

...Supported by the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, or a hopeful foreign government, a team of experts rapidly surveys the resources, statistics and urgent needs of its client...

...Steel is able contemporaneously to finance and construct the huge Fairless Works is totally irrelevant to Indian circumstances...

...What is badly missing in the literature of development is practical wisdom about the different needs of societies at different stages of historical evolution: the actual obstacles to economic development in actual society (India may lack capital, but what the Congo lacks much more immediately is the minimum instruments of effective public administration), the changes in income distribution and land tenure which are often the prerequisites of improvement, and the tendency of population to gallop off with the hard-won gains of economic output...

...Thus, there is no point in exporting American agricultural experts and techniques to countries whose peasants are too illiterate to apply the techniques or understand the experts...

...Here Galbraith allies himself to such economists as Theodore Schultz of the University of Chicago, who have recently taken to measuring the productivity of education as an investment in economic efficiency rather than as an article of personal consumption...

...I have even shared the responsibility for collecting a volume of readings on this topic for the illumination of university students...

...His specific plea is for practical action on the truly important problems of social justice, public administration and birth control, which so many public officials — and social scientists— evade either because these problems are too difficult to face or too subtle to measure...

...Seldom are the creators of what John Kenneth Galbraith terms "the sophisticated models and systems which are currently in fashion at Cambridge, the London School or even at Harvard" deterred from elegant manipulation by the scantiness and the unreliability of the statistics which they feed into their equation systems...

...As befits an ex-Ambassador to India, Galbraith is an activist but not an optimist...

...Similarly, arguments about the relative merits of free enterprise and government action are frivolous in the many instances where only government commands the resources and the talent to undertake a necessary project...

...Finally, there are the social scientists who endeavor to combine the insights of two or more of the conventional approaches to the understanding of other nations...

...Galbraith believes that in the underdeveloped countries additional outlays for textbooks, school buildings, and teacher-training will yield far higher returns in gross national product than equivalent expenditures for steel mills, machine tools and high dams...

...On the whole Galbraith's conclusions ought to be commonplaces, and they would be if so many of his colleagues were not intent upon measuring the trivial, ignoring the difficult, and recommending the implausible...

...This is the technique of the mathematical model which purports to identify, measure and project the major economic variables...

...In India the Bokaro steel mill will be built either by the government or by no one, and the fact that U.S...

...But with honorable exceptions the products of the experts are either too abstract for application to an actual society, or too selective in their emphases to promise successful change...

...This is the indispensable connection between social justice and economic development which our foreign policy often appears unable or unwilling to identify...

...In the main, the writings of economists and other social scientists on the problems and prospects of what used to be called the "underdeveloped" and are now delicately called the "developing" countries fall into one of three categories...

...He admires and emulates the application of general reasoning to general problems, and identifies the writings of Smith, Malthus, Mill and Bentham as examples of the proper approach of the economist to the study of society...

...Now each of these modes of investigation has its uses...