The Lost Massey Lectures (5 page)

Next it is evident that we should be cautious about urging forms of organization that are commonplace in the rich countries upon the poor. We have always mistrusted the man who mounts the rostrum to demand that the world commit itself here and now to free enterprise as it is uniquely revealed to the orator. There is a suspicion that he is not so much interested in spreading free enterprise as in provoking applause. But we also see that the imperatives of the poor country, as regards economic organization, are very different from our own. The notion that a moderately well-to-do country and a poor one can have a common economic policy has been a prime source of friction between the Soviets and China. It would be equally a source of friction between the United States and the Indians were we to insist that they do precisely as we do. We should not be above imitating the accomplishments of the Communist countries. We need not imitate their errors.

It is also evident that relations between the rich and the poor countries are likely to be touchy—as also the relations between the poor lands themselves. We must bear in mind that the governments of these countries are subject to pressures, growing out of their poverty, from which we are exempt. Our more tranquil reactions are not the mark of superior patience but of superior fortune. To realize this is to be more tolerant and more painstaking in the never-finished tasks of mediation, negotiation and compromise.

There are other lessons ranging from those that grow out of the relation of poverty to the birthrate and the bearing of this on
birth control techniques to the prospects, given the difficulties I have cited, for development itself. But I should like to postpone further discussion of remedies until we have had a closer look at the poor lands. We have seen that poverty produces much that is common in behavior. We must now see that it has many differences as to cause.

We have seen that poverty enforces strongly common patterns of behavior. If one had to settle on the distinction between nations of greatest descriptive importance in our time it would certainly be the difference between the rich and the poor.

And this, with some exceptions, has come to be the distinction employed by those who deal professionally with the problems of economic development. Excluding the Communist countries, their discussion has tended to divide the world into the developed and the underdeveloped sector and these terms generally reflect differences in incomes.
¹
The underdeveloped countries are assumed to have enough in common so that as “the descriptive literature on such countries suggests . . . we may confidently describe ‘a representative underdeveloped country'”.
²

To this tendency there are exceptions and the one that comes
first to mind is that adumbrated by Professor W. W. Rostow in his
The Stages of Economic Growth
³
with its not wholly reticent claim of being an answer to
The Communist Manifesto
. Professor Rostow regards all countries as passing in rather measured fashion from a traditional mold; into preparation for take-off into sustained growth; on to “the great watershed” of modern societies, the take-off; and finally on to maturity and then an age of high mass consumption.

There are several difficulties with Professor Rostow's scheme and his critics have not been lacking in either vigor or material. The take-off period he has assigned to various countries—Great Britain 1783-1802, France 1830-1860, Canada 1896-1914, Russia, putting Lenin and Stalin neatly where they belong, 1890-1914
⁴
—differs only marginally in rate and character of change from that before and after.
⁵
The notion of a take-off, a comparatively brief period when there is technical change, the building of railways and other social capital and the appearance of a political group devoted to modernization, radically minimizes the obstacles that the poor country encounters. As a consequence, the notion of development has become associated in the popular mind with an ease and certainty, and a rate of possible improvement, which is unfortunately at odds with the reality.
⁶

But the most serious fault of Professor Rostow is that, on closer examination, he is seen also to deal with the underdeveloped countries as a class. His countries are at different way stations along the same path; they differ from each other only as a child from an adolescent and an adolescent from someone in early maturity. The broad prescription for growth is the same for all; differentiation is required only in accordance with the stage of the country as with the age of the individual. Should it be that the path is different for different countries, the common prescription will obviously be inadequate or in error for some. This is the case.
It must be said in defense of Professor Rostow, in this respect, that his dereliction is considerably more mild than those who, forswearing even his distinctions, speak of all underdeveloped countries as one. The dangers here require a special word.

Once some years ago I visited Bhutan, a lovely pastoral country in the Himalayas with rich forests, clear streams and—unique in Asia—a declining population. It is indubitably underdeveloped. It has no industry, airport, railroad, post office, television, department store, diplomacy, bureaucracy, air pollution, outdoor advertising, or settled capital city. It occurred to me that a fence should be built around it to protect it from development. But I quickly recovered my senses. Economic development is an intrinsically normative subject. To talk about underdevelopment is to consider,
pro tanto
, the steps that will overcome economic backwardness. It follows that, so long as we speak of underdeveloped countries as a class, we will tend to assume a common therapy applicable to the whole class. We will devise programs that are meant to be applicable generally to underdeveloped countries; we will continue to say, as we often do now: “This is what an underdeveloped country should do.”

Or this will be the tendency. But, in fact, there is now considerable differentiation in our prescription for the poor countries. India, in per capita income, is almost as poor as any country in Africa. Yet we recognize that her capacity to use capital is much greater. So is her ability to plan the use of her resources. And with mention of India, the problem of population comes almost immediately to mind.

The African countries, for their part, are strongly interested in education. And gradually a design for development is emerging
which places primary emphasis on this. And this is in contrast, in turn, with the seeming requirements of many of the Latin American countries where social reform occupies a place of particular urgency. Though in analysis, we still speak of the underdeveloped country, for purposes of prescription we make important distinctions. There is need, evidently, for bringing the analysis abreast of the differentiation that practical judgment requires.

In recent years at Harvard, we have been experimenting with a classification of underdeveloped countries that is based on the obstacle or combination of obstacles which, in the given case, is the effective barrier to economic advance.
⁷
The identification of these obstacles or barriers is not a highly scientific exercise. It involves observation and judgment, and those who assess truth in accordance with whether it depends on precise measurement will find much in the classification to which they can object. However, the classification is not based on small distinctions. For selecting the largest tree from among those of similar size, there is no substitute for measurement. But if one tree towers over the others, much can be accomplished by inspection. And all scientific method must be seen in context. Imperfect classification is better than the aggregation of unlike cases. It still remains the first step toward science, however short the step or intractable the material.

The classification is a four-fold one. Three classes are important for present purposes; the fourth embraces the countries where there is no strongly operative obstacle to development and where, accordingly, it proceeds at a more or less rapid pace. It is useful to give each of the classes or models not only a number but an identification with the part of the world to which they are the most applicable. Their application is not, however, confined to the
geographical or other area in the designation. The three models of underdevelopment are:

As noted, the Models are set apart from each other by the barrier or combination of barriers to development which are operative in each case. In some instances, the barriers which characterize one Model are also operative in another. There are, as might be expected, intermediate or mixed cases. And the geographical designations do not include all of the countries of the area. Ceylon is not typical of the South Asian Model; Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya are not characteristic of the Sub-Sahara African Model; Mexico and Costa Rica do not conform to the Latin American Model; and Brazil, a notably difficult case, conforms more closely to that Model in the northern than in the southern states.

In the Model I or Sub-Sahara countries, the principal barrier to development is the absence of what I shall call a minimum cultural base. It is important, both for reasons of tact and precision, that this be not misinterpreted; the problem is not absence of aptitude but absence of opportunity. Most of the countries that are described by this Model have recently emerged from colonialism, sometimes of the more regressive sort. More fortunate countries have had decades and centuries of preparation for the tasks of economic development. These have had only a few years. “To an extent unmatched in most of the underdeveloped world, positions of skill and responsibility (in Africa) were until recently in the
hands of non-Africans. . . . As late as 1958 there were only about 8,000 Africans graduated from all the academic secondary schools below the Sahara, and only about 10,000 others were studying in universities—more than half of these in Ghana and Nigeria. . . . in 1962 there were still few African countries where more than two hundred Africans received full secondary diplomas.”
⁸
When the Republic of the Congo gained independence, there were fewer than 25,000 Congolese with any secondary education and only about thirty Congolese university graduates. The first university, Lovanium, had opened only in 1954 and only thirteen Africans had graduated by 1960.
⁹

Professors Harbison and Myers have classified numerous countries in accordance with their resources in educated and trained manpower. In their lowest class, primary and secondary teachers average 17 per 10,000 population. On the basis of limited data, there are 0.6 scientists and engineers per 10,000 population and 0.5 physicians and dentists.
¹⁰
Of the seventeen countries placed formally in their lowest class, all but three (Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Haiti) are in Africa. Another twelve African countries were cited as probably falling in this class.

The consequences of an inadequate cultural base are comprehensive—on government, the economy, internal security, communications, even foreign policy. But the most visible manifestation is on the apparatus of government. People with the requisite education, training, and ethical standards for performing public tasks are unavailable. As a consequence, taxes are collected in haphazard or arbitrary fashion and public funds are spent inefficiently or for no particular purpose except the reward of the recipients. Where this is the case, government will ordinarily be unstable; those who do not have access to public income will have a strong incentive to seek the ouster of those who do. As a further consequence, law enforcement is unreliable; and so, at a minimum, are essential
public services. In this context, in turn, there can be no economic development that involves any sophistication in technique or organization.
¹¹
Primitive and local trade will flourish under almost any handicaps. But larger scale commerce and industry—the modern corporate enterprise—are demanding in their environment; their persons and property must be reasonably secure; their property cannot be hidden and must not be taxed merely because it is visible; profits cannot be readily concealed and must not be taxed simply because they are made; their business cannot be transacted in the absence of posts, telephones, and common carrier transportation. In the colonial era, firms were allowed to provide for their own security and establish services essential to their existence. With independence, such extraterritorial administration is not ordinarily permissible.

But the inadequacy of government is only one of the manifestations of an inadequate cultural base. And it reflects the absence of schools, colleges and cultural environment for producing or preparing people for public tasks. All discussion of economic development involves difficult problems of sequence and circularity. This is an example. How does a country get an educational system without an adequate government? How does it get a government without the qualified people that an educational system provides? There is no obvious answer. But it helps to have narrowed the problem to this point. For we then recognize that little is accomplished by action that does not break into this particular circle. Assistance in the form of capital funds will not be useful if there is no one with the technical competence to employ it, and if the environment is hostile to the resulting enterprises. Technical assistance will not be useful if there is no one to advise or assist. In the next Model, progress waits on reforms which reduce the power of a vested ruling elite. Here there is no such elite.