I didn’t mean to claim, and don’t think I did claim, that development is generally bad, or that European colonialism generally bears primary responsibility for the problems in troubled developing colonies, or even that it’s a bad thing on average in the long run for the people involved. I made, I think, a narrower claim: that if you don’t have a competent state accountable to a cohesive country then your national income is not really a national resource, that GDP ideology can mask processes of extraction, and that intercountry extraction can involve driving wedges between people who might otherwise have been accountable to each other, in ways that are bad in the long run for both cultures involved.
This isn’t well-defended as a sweeping theory of all development because it isn’t a sweeping theory of all development, it’s a criticism of certain patterns of unseeing that make the picture falsely appear simpler than it is, generating occasional anomalies visible in the system like the convergence debate, covered in the prior post I linked at the top.
I don’t think anything in my argument claimed that no countries developed rapidly under IMF/World Bank guidance, though before taking a position on any country I’d want to know exactly what was meant by “development” in that case. Australia and Canada seem like they started out more similar the Netherlands than to Nigeria. Saudi Arabia seems to have a dynasty secure enough to be focused on ameliorating their long-run problems with the medium-term revenue rather than cashing out and skipping town, but even so, I dealt quite explicitly with Saudi problems converting money into capacity in the prior article on Solow convergence, specifically in the section Resource extraction and the question of feedback. I’m less familiar with the UAE situation, or Indonesia and Malaysia. You could say more on these and their relevance.
I don’t think it’s overfitting to criticize the standard framework as oversimplified in particular ways.
I didn’t mean to claim, and don’t think I did claim, that development is generally bad, or that European colonialism generally bears primary responsibility for the problems in troubled developing colonies, or even that it’s a bad thing on average in the long run for the people involved. I made, I think, a narrower claim: that if you don’t have a competent state accountable to a cohesive country then your national income is not really a national resource, that GDP ideology can mask processes of extraction, and that intercountry extraction can involve driving wedges between people who might otherwise have been accountable to each other, in ways that are bad in the long run for both cultures involved.
This isn’t well-defended as a sweeping theory of all development because it isn’t a sweeping theory of all development, it’s a criticism of certain patterns of unseeing that make the picture falsely appear simpler than it is, generating occasional anomalies visible in the system like the convergence debate, covered in the prior post I linked at the top.
I don’t think anything in my argument claimed that no countries developed rapidly under IMF/World Bank guidance, though before taking a position on any country I’d want to know exactly what was meant by “development” in that case. Australia and Canada seem like they started out more similar the Netherlands than to Nigeria. Saudi Arabia seems to have a dynasty secure enough to be focused on ameliorating their long-run problems with the medium-term revenue rather than cashing out and skipping town, but even so, I dealt quite explicitly with Saudi problems converting money into capacity in the prior article on Solow convergence, specifically in the section Resource extraction and the question of feedback. I’m less familiar with the UAE situation, or Indonesia and Malaysia. You could say more on these and their relevance.
I don’t think it’s overfitting to criticize the standard framework as oversimplified in particular ways.