Document file:///D|/Export1/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll ...

Document
much less exciting career. One may also argue that development economics was discredited by lack of
practical success. After all, relative to the hopes of the 1950s and even the 1960s, the performance of
most developing countries has been dismal. (Indeed, the polite phrase "developing country" itself has
become an embarrassment, when it must be used in such sentences as "Per capita income in the
developing countries of Sub-Saharan Africa has declined steadily since the mid-1970s.") It is unfair to
blame Western economists for more than a small fraction of this failure, but the ideas of development
economics were too often used as a justification for policies that in retrospect impeded growth rather
than helping it along. Where rapid economic growth did occur, it occurred in ways that were not
anticipated by the development theorists.
Page 24
Yet neither declining external demand for development economists nor their practical failures fully
explain the sputtering out of the field. Purely intellectual problems were also extremely important. In
particular, during the years when high development theory flourished, the leading development
economists failed to turn their intuitive insights into clear-cut models that could serve as the core of an
enduring discipline.
From the point of view of a modern economist, the most striking feature of the works of high
development theory is their adherence to a discursive, nonmathematical style. Economics has, of
course, become vastly more mathematical over time. Nonetheless, development economics was archaic
in style even for its own time. Of the four most famous high development works, Rosenstein-Rodan's
was approximately contemporary with Samuelson's formulation of the Heckscher-Ohlin model, while
Lewis, Myrdal,
file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_24.html [4/18/2007 10:30:02 AM]