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The exception proves the rule. Lewis's surplus labor concept was the model that launched a thousand
papers; even though surplus labor assumptions were already standard among development theorists, the
empirical basis for assuming surplus labor was weak, and the idea of external economies/strategic
complementarity was surely more interesting. The point was, of course, that precisely because he did
not mix economies of scale into his framework, Lewis offered theorists something they could model
using available tools.
But surplus labor was too thin an idea on which to base an enduring field. To be sure, for a while dualeconomy
models with constant returns and perfect competition were a staple of development courses.
With the key role of dualism in justifying the Big Push lost, however, these dual-economy models
gradually came to seem pointless. By 1980 or so, virtually all vestiges of high development theory had
disappeared from development economics. In that sense, the whole enterprise of high development
theory was a failure.
The irony, of course, is that high development theory was right. By this I do not mean that the Big Push
is really the right story of how development takes place, or even that the issues raised in high
development theory are necessarily the key ones for making poor countries rich. What I do mean is that
the unconventional themes put forth by the high development theorists their emphasis on strategic
complementarity in investment decisions and on the problem of coordination failure did in fact identify
important possibilities that are neglected in competitive equilibrium models. But the high development
theorists failed to convince their colleagues of the importance of those possibilities. Worse, they failed
even to communicate clearly
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