In the end George Kennan was right: containment was the way to win the Cold War because, ultimately, the really-existing socialist system inside the Iron Curtain was not made to work well enough...
As you can tell I have thoughts on this as I actually had to read Rostow and Prebisch and Gerschenkron and Lewis in grad school and ultimately did not find any of them as useful as Solow and Meade. :)
Rostow (at least in your 1 para summary) is really doing can-opener economics. Assume « guaranteed property rights » (to what degree and for which properties ? ) and full employment (FE being an outcome of growth and a feature of advanced economies) and start from there. He’s assumed away two of the hard parts. And certainly Wilhoit’s aphorism would apply to property rights in the latifundia economies.
Prebisch, OTOH, tells a simple but true story (though he probably overestimates the elasticity of commodity supply and implicitly understates its variability) in which poor countries provide their value added for the benefit of the rich.
¨In the end George Kennan was right: containment was the way to win the Cold War because, ultimately, the really-existing socialist system inside the Iron Curtain was not made to work well enough, while the market-capitalist system outside the Iron Curtain was.¨
No one was going to conquer Russia and throw out the Bolshies. That had been shown in the aftermath of World War I. Essentially Russia is a giant blob of territory that mixes territory nobody wants, is mostly inaccessible, plus minority territories that are not powerful enough to hold their own against outsiders, plus some territory that outsiders want in the western parts and is just generally unoccupiable by outside armies because no one has the goddamn manpower plus the necessary logistics to take the place over and hold it. The various misadventures of the expeditionary forces of foreign powers in the aftermath of WWI pretty clearly demonstrated that. Russia is basically Supersized Afghanistan, except one that can be held together from the central position.
(Right now, if the Chinese were game and willing to spare the expense, they could steam-roller Siberia and take possession. They´re probably the only ones that could. Virtually the entire Russian army is in Ukraine. (I´m putting aside the question of nuclear weapons.) The balance of power has changed radically from the Sino-Soviet conflicts of the 1970´s. But what would that get the Chinese? Some trees and a lot of melting permafrost? Easier to just let the Russians deliver the goods.)
On the other hand, the ´let´s make nice with Russia´ initiatives of the 20´s and 30´s didn´t exactly work well either. The Russians would invariably have large contingents of spies and activists trying to overthrow the nice countries government from the inside.
So that leaves containment.
¨The supersession of Kosygin by Brezhnev, and the tilt of Soviet policy starting in the late 1960s away from domestic economic development o what one might characterize as third-world adventurism—that has always been something that I have never understood well.¨
Trying to overthrow governments in Europe didn´t work out, revolutionary movements in the West did not manage to seize control (as Trotsky wanted and predicted), and the United States had the advantage in nuclear weapons. That meant the USSR could not win a nuclear war. If you do want to create revolutionary Communist governments all over the world, to bring together a world-spanning Communist empire (that would be lead by all those pioneering Communists revolutionaries in holy Mother Russia, uh, Mother USSR) then the easiest way around the US & the First World countries is to start recruiting in the Third World, even if this is totally not the strategy that pre-Russian Revolution Bolsheviks believed would work. If they couldn´t get in through the front door, or the side door, they could maybe sneak through the rear. It sorta worked, the essential problem with that strategy is that being that being governed by Communist does not speed up economic development in the poor countries. It likely retards economic development for roughly the same reason it didn´t work all that great in the Soviet Union - authoritarian governments tend to spend all their time enriching themselves and punishing their people for getting out of line, so no one can focus on improving their economic situation.
The Chinese have essentially replicated the shifts in Soviet strategy, with the wrinkle that they figured out how to seduce western right-wing oligarchs (who would normally be all in on opposing any Communist Party) to their side by catering to them and rewarding them. They wanted the oligarchs to sell China the rope to hang the oligarch with. (I don´t think this was a grand strategic decision to seduce the oligarchs, I think they bumbled their way to success.)
The problem for the Chinese is their strategy depends on exporting wealthy markets. That´s their Achilles heel. The West starting to wise up to the game the Chinese have been playing and moving to reducing the impact of Chinese exports is forcing the Chinese to adopt a version of the Soviet strategic shift to trying to bring Third world countries over to their side.
The Soviet strategy was revolutionary cadres plus war to advance their position and seize the means of internal development for the Soviet Union and break out of the socialism in one country trap. The Chinese strategy is a (pseudo-? quasi-?) pseudo-capitalist commercial export first strategy so that they seize of the means of military production and break out of the Chinese military inadequacy trap. So they can bring about the World Revolution which would then be lead by the seasoned Communist revolutionaries of Beijing.
¨Rostow: In a thumbnail, any country that guarantees property rights and maintains full employment can develop as a democratic, market, capitalist society, as long as it boosts its savings rate and invests at scale.¨
That´s where any country that wants to be wealthy wants to wind up.
Prebisch: ¨Why not? Because the benefits from its technological advances all flow to the core, and none of them remain in the periphery. Hence developing countries cannot rely on the market to generate self-sustaining growth, but must subsidize, plan, and socialize. That’s Prebisch.¨
Yes? ->.
¨Indeed, Rostow seems to me to have little sense that the most successful industrializers of the 1950s—in Southern Europe and Japan—were following a significantly different path than the British-New England path that Rostow, as an economic historian, had done so much to map out and understand.¨
...they´re both right? Any country, like say, Brazil is going to want to get or get to a working version of Rostow, but they can´t get there the straight-forward way that worked for the UK or New England. So they have to subsidize and plan and socialize. Brazil (in the 50´s and 60´s) tried the Prebisch route in service of getting to where they could reach Rostow land. It didn´t work in that it wasn´t a magic formula but the development strategy had lots of positive effects, right? Brazil had a ´walled garden´ computer industry for a long time that they eventually had to give up on, but it had lots of positive effects in that they built up an industrial and R&D base. They aren´t a first rank country, but they are much closer than they would have in the 1950´s. Their big disadvantage has been being afflicted with right-wing juntas, which has retarded development.
¨In her view, there was a road from Pinochet back to the rich and democratic Chile of today, while there was no road from Allende, or rather from Allende's likely more hardline communist successors, to the Chile of today.¨
I think this was a case of Kirkpatrick catastrophizing, along with a lot of other people and getting out way over their skies. Essentially an earlier version of ´if we turn Iraq into a pro-American democracy the Middle Eastern autocracies will fall and everything will be great forever.´ The entire notion was driven in part by internal American politics, yeah?
elm
if i remember the beliefs of my bestiary of lunatic right-wing oligarchs correctly
"The tilt of Soviet policy starting in the late 1960s away from domestic economic development to ... third-world adventurism—that has always been something that I have never understood well." It seems to me that "spreading the revolution" was always an essential goal and purpose of communism. If you're always engaged in a war against the capitalists somewhere, then you have a ready excuse for why you can't provide your citizens with freedom and better material possessions. In contrast, after the fall of the Soviet Union the Chinese Communist Party quickly accelerated their choice of pragmatism over Marxism.
I don’t get the Sukarno quote. Indonesia did not get Irian Jaya but did get Rostovian development.
Also, surely you are not putting Prebisch more on the side of export led growth than Rostow. I’d say the US is the only case of the Prebisch approach working.
Prebisch: As stated not in contrast to Rostov. There is an argument in Prebisch that's not is Rostow for an optimal export tax if executed as a group, but there is no reason for export tax revenues to be the only source of increased saving. Neither warns against the danger of taxing exports beyond the optimal rate, especially in the form of import substituting protection.
As you can tell I have thoughts on this as I actually had to read Rostow and Prebisch and Gerschenkron and Lewis in grad school and ultimately did not find any of them as useful as Solow and Meade. :)
Rostow (at least in your 1 para summary) is really doing can-opener economics. Assume « guaranteed property rights » (to what degree and for which properties ? ) and full employment (FE being an outcome of growth and a feature of advanced economies) and start from there. He’s assumed away two of the hard parts. And certainly Wilhoit’s aphorism would apply to property rights in the latifundia economies.
Prebisch, OTOH, tells a simple but true story (though he probably overestimates the elasticity of commodity supply and implicitly understates its variability) in which poor countries provide their value added for the benefit of the rich.
¨In the end George Kennan was right: containment was the way to win the Cold War because, ultimately, the really-existing socialist system inside the Iron Curtain was not made to work well enough, while the market-capitalist system outside the Iron Curtain was.¨
No one was going to conquer Russia and throw out the Bolshies. That had been shown in the aftermath of World War I. Essentially Russia is a giant blob of territory that mixes territory nobody wants, is mostly inaccessible, plus minority territories that are not powerful enough to hold their own against outsiders, plus some territory that outsiders want in the western parts and is just generally unoccupiable by outside armies because no one has the goddamn manpower plus the necessary logistics to take the place over and hold it. The various misadventures of the expeditionary forces of foreign powers in the aftermath of WWI pretty clearly demonstrated that. Russia is basically Supersized Afghanistan, except one that can be held together from the central position.
(Right now, if the Chinese were game and willing to spare the expense, they could steam-roller Siberia and take possession. They´re probably the only ones that could. Virtually the entire Russian army is in Ukraine. (I´m putting aside the question of nuclear weapons.) The balance of power has changed radically from the Sino-Soviet conflicts of the 1970´s. But what would that get the Chinese? Some trees and a lot of melting permafrost? Easier to just let the Russians deliver the goods.)
On the other hand, the ´let´s make nice with Russia´ initiatives of the 20´s and 30´s didn´t exactly work well either. The Russians would invariably have large contingents of spies and activists trying to overthrow the nice countries government from the inside.
So that leaves containment.
¨The supersession of Kosygin by Brezhnev, and the tilt of Soviet policy starting in the late 1960s away from domestic economic development o what one might characterize as third-world adventurism—that has always been something that I have never understood well.¨
Trying to overthrow governments in Europe didn´t work out, revolutionary movements in the West did not manage to seize control (as Trotsky wanted and predicted), and the United States had the advantage in nuclear weapons. That meant the USSR could not win a nuclear war. If you do want to create revolutionary Communist governments all over the world, to bring together a world-spanning Communist empire (that would be lead by all those pioneering Communists revolutionaries in holy Mother Russia, uh, Mother USSR) then the easiest way around the US & the First World countries is to start recruiting in the Third World, even if this is totally not the strategy that pre-Russian Revolution Bolsheviks believed would work. If they couldn´t get in through the front door, or the side door, they could maybe sneak through the rear. It sorta worked, the essential problem with that strategy is that being that being governed by Communist does not speed up economic development in the poor countries. It likely retards economic development for roughly the same reason it didn´t work all that great in the Soviet Union - authoritarian governments tend to spend all their time enriching themselves and punishing their people for getting out of line, so no one can focus on improving their economic situation.
The Chinese have essentially replicated the shifts in Soviet strategy, with the wrinkle that they figured out how to seduce western right-wing oligarchs (who would normally be all in on opposing any Communist Party) to their side by catering to them and rewarding them. They wanted the oligarchs to sell China the rope to hang the oligarch with. (I don´t think this was a grand strategic decision to seduce the oligarchs, I think they bumbled their way to success.)
The problem for the Chinese is their strategy depends on exporting wealthy markets. That´s their Achilles heel. The West starting to wise up to the game the Chinese have been playing and moving to reducing the impact of Chinese exports is forcing the Chinese to adopt a version of the Soviet strategic shift to trying to bring Third world countries over to their side.
The Soviet strategy was revolutionary cadres plus war to advance their position and seize the means of internal development for the Soviet Union and break out of the socialism in one country trap. The Chinese strategy is a (pseudo-? quasi-?) pseudo-capitalist commercial export first strategy so that they seize of the means of military production and break out of the Chinese military inadequacy trap. So they can bring about the World Revolution which would then be lead by the seasoned Communist revolutionaries of Beijing.
¨Rostow: In a thumbnail, any country that guarantees property rights and maintains full employment can develop as a democratic, market, capitalist society, as long as it boosts its savings rate and invests at scale.¨
That´s where any country that wants to be wealthy wants to wind up.
Prebisch: ¨Why not? Because the benefits from its technological advances all flow to the core, and none of them remain in the periphery. Hence developing countries cannot rely on the market to generate self-sustaining growth, but must subsidize, plan, and socialize. That’s Prebisch.¨
Yes? ->.
¨Indeed, Rostow seems to me to have little sense that the most successful industrializers of the 1950s—in Southern Europe and Japan—were following a significantly different path than the British-New England path that Rostow, as an economic historian, had done so much to map out and understand.¨
...they´re both right? Any country, like say, Brazil is going to want to get or get to a working version of Rostow, but they can´t get there the straight-forward way that worked for the UK or New England. So they have to subsidize and plan and socialize. Brazil (in the 50´s and 60´s) tried the Prebisch route in service of getting to where they could reach Rostow land. It didn´t work in that it wasn´t a magic formula but the development strategy had lots of positive effects, right? Brazil had a ´walled garden´ computer industry for a long time that they eventually had to give up on, but it had lots of positive effects in that they built up an industrial and R&D base. They aren´t a first rank country, but they are much closer than they would have in the 1950´s. Their big disadvantage has been being afflicted with right-wing juntas, which has retarded development.
¨In her view, there was a road from Pinochet back to the rich and democratic Chile of today, while there was no road from Allende, or rather from Allende's likely more hardline communist successors, to the Chile of today.¨
I think this was a case of Kirkpatrick catastrophizing, along with a lot of other people and getting out way over their skies. Essentially an earlier version of ´if we turn Iraq into a pro-American democracy the Middle Eastern autocracies will fall and everything will be great forever.´ The entire notion was driven in part by internal American politics, yeah?
elm
if i remember the beliefs of my bestiary of lunatic right-wing oligarchs correctly
"The tilt of Soviet policy starting in the late 1960s away from domestic economic development to ... third-world adventurism—that has always been something that I have never understood well." It seems to me that "spreading the revolution" was always an essential goal and purpose of communism. If you're always engaged in a war against the capitalists somewhere, then you have a ready excuse for why you can't provide your citizens with freedom and better material possessions. In contrast, after the fall of the Soviet Union the Chinese Communist Party quickly accelerated their choice of pragmatism over Marxism.
I don’t get the Sukarno quote. Indonesia did not get Irian Jaya but did get Rostovian development.
Also, surely you are not putting Prebisch more on the side of export led growth than Rostow. I’d say the US is the only case of the Prebisch approach working.
Prebisch: As stated not in contrast to Rostov. There is an argument in Prebisch that's not is Rostow for an optimal export tax if executed as a group, but there is no reason for export tax revenues to be the only source of increased saving. Neither warns against the danger of taxing exports beyond the optimal rate, especially in the form of import substituting protection.