fatvegan

I had to do a reading on Third World politics for my development course. The reading was written in 1983 I think. At the beginning it made some statement along the lines of "Over the last few decades Third World nations have been unable to translate strong economic growth into the construction of strong political institutions."

The few decades the author was referring to were the dark ages of economic policy as far as most economists are concerned. Those countries were doing all the "wrong" things. At the time economists look at these countries and pointed out all the things they were failing at. In retrospect, that apparent failure looks remarkably like success. The idea that a large bulk of Third World countries could possibly grow strongly sounds totally foreign now. For those countries, I reckon we can put quite a lot of the last 20 years down to abundant lashings of politically correct economic diarrhea.