Against Teleology: New Social Orders are Built Brick by Brick

In a class recently, we had a discussion on the stagist theory of growth that was supposed to be answered several weeks in the future. I went early to the message board and posted that “Human civilization has manifested itself in a series of organizational structures, each determined by its primary mode of production, particularly the division of labor that dominates in each stage. 1) the tribal form, 2) primitive communism, 3) feudal or estate property, 4) capitalism”. I posted this without citing Marx, and it was mostly done in jest. When I posted it, I was unaware of the Rostow model of growth theory, where we move from traditional society to “the preconditions for take-off” to take-off to modernity where the economy is mature, and the people are mass consuming (Cypher 189-192).

What the Marxian framework and the Rostow model share is that, as Cypher notes, they are an attempt at a universalist model of development (187). So, if you follow either of them, then all societies must pass through these stages. If you subscribe to either one of these fully, then you social and economic prescriptions become based on moving the country of interest through these stages. My thinking on this goes to arguments in the late nineteenth century about the possibilities of the development of a communist state. The argument was that it was the most Capitalists states that would move to the next inevitable step first. This led people to think that it would be England and Germany that would be the first homes of the universal brotherhood of the worker’s state. And well, we can see that the lens of history disproved that, as it was the giant Russian state that was levered into the international vanguard as the first communist state. There was a big problem with this in terms of Marx’s theory of stages in that Tsarist Russia was agrarian, so that one of the first things that had to be done for the new Soviet Union was to industrialize it. The fact that they did industrialize as much as they did in the years prior to the Great Patriotic War is a feather in the cap of the Soviet system and its leadership (though at much human cost).

The problem with both Marx’s outline and Rostow’s is that it tries to universalize experience based on a narrow understanding of how the world works through limited history (Cypher 187). A too-narrow understanding of how history can develop leaves all other possibilities on the outside looking in. If we want to say that all nations must move through these stages and then the only logical endpoint is the last of the numbered states, it limits the possibilities of what growth and development can look like. It takes the path dependency that we created for ourselves and maps it upon another set of people. Though there have been benefits to our mode of take-off and modernization, there have been social and environmental costs that we do not necessarily have to grant to people in the name of development. Both models are well in parallel, with Rostow adding finer graduation, but they have the same end point, a developed world (Marx just wants to see a different set of people own the capital). 

Works Cited

Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Sovereignty and the Stateless Corporations

Today I want to examine the role of the multi-national corporations in development. These bodies are not new. In an earlier post, I mentioned the effect of the South Sea Companies, but the current corporations are perhaps even more pernicious. This is because where the former corporations were arms of the state with some sort of protected monopoly, the new corporations are stateless. We can talk about where these corporations are located, where the US went to war in Latin America to protect the United Fruit Company or even more broadly the forever war in the MENA to protect the Good Arabs against the Bad Arabs and Persians and to ensure continued oil flows, but even wars started 20 years ago feel like relics of the past. The modern, globalized economies no longer have oil companies or industrial giants at the top of the leaderboard of market capitalization. Instead we have more nebulous technology companies where Amazon and Apple and Microsoft are pushing a trillion dollars in market capitalization, though they gave a large percentage of that paper wealth back over the winter. What we see is that the multinational corporations have more power than the most powerful states. In the United States, the corporations have been dodging taxes for years by claiming that the revenue that they created really was created in low-tax jurisdictions through accounting tricks like selling intellectual property to a subsidiary in Ireland and then leasing back the rights to that intellectual property to the parent company. The US has twice enacted one-time repatriations where they lowered the tax rate in hopes that the corporations would move that capital back to where they are technically domiciled and invest in the US, but when it happened instead the money went right to dividends and buy backs. The recent tax changes wiped forty percent off the top corporate rate from 35% to 21% because the people in charge are so beholden to the wealth and power of internationalized capital. It feels like a very vulgar and superficial analysis, but it has power because it is true.

Photo by Lucas Campoi from Pexels

The age of globalization is the age of the large corporations, and that is depressing because at the very least the age prior to or postmodern period was driven by state actors who were accountable in theory to its citizens. We see that even Apple can subvert the will of the citizens of the United States and take advantage of all the benefits that helped it grow from the technology developed in American universities and the giant market that a post-war industrialized economy built. They then take access to that market and do not reinvest in it, instead concentrating wealth in the hands of the stock-holders which is a small minority of even the United States. What I worry about in development is the impossibility of development upwards. There is still manufacturing that needs to be done. It keeps getting shifted to lower cost areas from China to Vietnam to Bangladesh to Ethiopia. There is arbitrage in terms of what needs to be paid for labor and the environmental standards that factories will be held to, and subcontract arrangements so that the miners and the manufactures can claim reasonable deniability when a factory collapses or a tailing dam collapses, and thousands are killed and a river basin is poisoned for a generation because it was cheaper to do that than to build in the protections from the beginning. I worry about convergence because this is happening but faster — corporation are leaving Bangladesh before it becomes self-sufficient and moving on, yet the industrial base is not there yet. I worry that Brazil will give away the rights to the Amazon rainforest so that it can be logged to the soil and then farmed to exhaustion quickly because the soil was not made for farming. I worry that countries from the most developed to the least are giving control to the corporations because the only thing worse than being exploited is to not be exploited. I worry that the multilateral organizations are forcing the hands of many countries because part of the restructuring process is opening the markets though we have seen from Chang and other how important it is to protect the industrial base of developing countries in a managed way, and not to expose a nascent industry to the full onslaught of the market.

It is not just the seeming impossibility of development upwards that concerns me. What we see with the current mood in the United States is illustrated by authors like Branko Milan and Thomas Piketty, in that the postmodern, globalized economy, there is a reconcentrat8ion of wealth. Where the industrial economy, there was a much broader sharing of the wealth so that in the west the postwar era gets called the “Golden Age of Capitalism” or “Les Trente Glorieuses” to indicate a more inclusive economy where capitalism worked — if you were a straight white male in the west. The less inclusive growth has presaged a political mood that has seen the rise of political movements like neo-fascism in the rise of Donald Trump and Victor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Brexit. This is all in the face of an incredible shifting of the ground that the economic battle is fought on. Global climate change is a fact and is not just in the rising sea levels. In the near term we must deal with the melting of the Himalayan glaciers which provide water to billions of people in Asia. Deserts are spreading in Australia and Africa, and farmland in coastal regions is becoming impossible to grow crops on because the ground is salinized. And what is the response of global capital? They celebrate the possibility of shipping times being shortened through an ice-free Artic Ocean.

There then is a real question to be asked about what kind of policies you can make as a country that has little leverage. The world, which is burning, is more and more controlled by multinational corporations. There is still a twofold response that is available. The first is that there is a second mover advantage. It is incredibly arrogant to say from the standpoint as a western observer that the less developed countries are stuck in their relative and absolute positions. There remains a possibility for growth that is not as harmful for the planet and allows for moving to a more comfortable existence. Through a green-focused growth strategy, LDCs can develop these industries, and be leaders in the technology. This will allow so many of the remaining low-hanging developmental public health issues like safe running water to be dealt with. It is just an entirely different context, so we do have the past to look to, but it is an entirely different field of battle, as Cypher notes: “no nation can or should attempt to duplicate the success story of any other. Nations have been able to build on the accomplishments of other nations, often skipping over, and learning from, the arduous steps taken by path breaking nations” (383).

Works Cited

Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

What about Convergence: The Solow Model and Alternatives

In his textbook on “The Process of Development,” James Cypher outlines multiple models on how to look at development when you move from the classical standpoint to the more mathed up neoclassical framework. The first model he introduces is the Solow growth model where total output is a function of technology, capital, and labor, with diminishing returns to capital and labor. In the model, technology comes from outside, and “it is this exogeneous technology which is basic to higher levels of income per capita over time” (150). The model predicts two important things. The first is that there is a steady state equilibrium that can be attained, and that there is a convergence between similar countries. Opposed the classical models, in the Solow model focusing on building capital goods will not increase the rate of growth, and there is a ceiling on levels of income per the rate of savings (which equals the rate of investment) (151), so the model intuits that the way to growth is the increase the savings rate of the nation to raise that ceiling. 

Winding Roads Ahead

The Solow model was created in response to the Harrod-Domar growth model, a more Keynesian approach. Unlike the Solow model which looked at the savings rate, the Harrod-Domar model sees the rate of growth as a function of both the savings ratio as well as the capital / output ratio (152). The Keynesian view is that investment drives saving, so that the prescription here is to increase the investment. Cypher notes that all the theories lead to the same basic idea: “an expansion of total physical capital goods as a share of total output, that is higher levels of investment, that create higher income levels” (153).  One thing about this model is that instead of a steady state, there’s a real chance in the model for instability, so that the country can grow more quickly, spiraling off inflation, or not quickly enough, lagging.

What the debate between the two models really shows is that we can make these models on paper, but ultimately, what we want to see is what these models look like when we take them from paper to the real world – what maps more to reality, is there convergence or instability? The Solow model is the most attractive because it assumes that if the model is correct, then there are not that many levers we need to be able to pull to make less developed countries meet their peers so that the people in these countries have better lives. But the Harrod-Domar growth model give policy-makes a much harder bullseye to hit. 

More contemporary researchers have explored which of these models is more reflective of reality, such as Michelle Baddeley in her paper “Convergence or Divergence?” Baddeley’s examination sheds doubt on the validity of the Solow model. What she finds is that the data does not fully bear out Solow and suggest that something closer to Harrod-Domar is right – the targets are not as easy to hit as suggested, and if you miss them, there are negative consequences: “there has been limited convergence and limited equalization in the distribution of international income and / or that population growth has been too high” (396). The world has become more open, and globalization has allowed technology to be exogenous to other countries in that they have access to technology in unprecedented ways, but there is still a lack of convergence (406-7). Considering findings that trade and globalization heighten volatility and do not lead to convergence, what do we do? Baddeley suggest that the answer is if we “more carefully regulated and monitored” the financial system as to “moderate the impacts of adverse selection and moral hazard on effective financial decision making” (407). There is a lot of heaving lifting built into that line, as it would include boarder global coordination, an outcome that feels much less likely now than when she was writing. 

What are the implications if the Solow model is not correct and the evidence Michelle Baddeley marshals to her argument is right? As I wrote elsewhere in this class from a purely mathematical standpoint it illustrates the impossibility of convergence because the absolute level of growth needed for less developed countries to meet the output levels of currently developed countries is seemingly impossible. That locks in the current levels of development and the international division of labor and gifts the residents of the developed countries with incredible unearned rents that instead of being recognized by the residents of those countries, turns into the accepted birthright in the heads of so many and serves as a justification for supremacy and racism. 

Works Cited

Baddeley, M. (2006) Convergence or Divergence? The Impacts of Globalisation on Growth and Inequality in Less Developed Countries, International Review of Applied Economics, 20:3, 391-410, DOI: 10.1080/02692170600736250

Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Geography and Resources in the Development of Industrial Capitalism

 Many factors that were internal and important to the rise of industrial capitalism in western Europe. When asked why capitalism as we know it started in England and not somewhere else, on can handwave about the English Genius, but there were historical and geographical reasons that capitalism started in England. 

One of the geographical reasons was that there are several rivers that are short and spread to the sea. This is important because the moving force for a lot of factories was a waterwheel that was driven by consistent water flows, and there was a huge belt that ran around this central axel that drove the machinery that was needed to make the division of labor work. The other geographic reason is that there was a lot of coal, and it was easy to get to. This was important because even though there were a lot of rivers, the development of the steam engine made coal resources necessary, but if you wanted to build a factory you were not limited to riverfront property.

Photo by Artem Bali from Pexels

One historical reason that Capitalism as we know it started in England was that there was a class of people who were available to work these machines. The enclosure acts helped push people off the land. So that there was a reciprocal relationship between industrialization and enclosure. Machines made people less necessary, and with enclosures there were more people available to build and work machines. 

How does one take these historical precedents as a guide-post for how to organize your economy then? Well, for one, geography is huge. One of the reasons that Singapore is now lauded as an example to emulate (see England wanting to be the “Singapore of Europe” post-Brexit) is not just because it has free-market tendencies, but because it is strategically located, with up to a quarter of global trade passing through the Straits of Malacca (Fessenden). Though geography and access to resources is important, they are not necessary – for example, Switzerland has been able to build its manufacturing base despite being a landlocked nation in the alps, with its own cultural barriers, being a meeting point for French, German, and Italian cultures. But resources are not the secret either, since the resource course and Dutch disease are both well documented, where focusing on one resource limits your economy and makes your currency vulnerable to outside forces. It is also, on its own, not something any country can change. How would it be possible to take South Sudan and put it in a more convenient place?

The more salient issue is the one about industrialization. As we have seen in Engels writing on the Manchester of his day, the housing for internal immigrants was poor, in that it was not built for people, but as for animals. We can see the same thing when we read about the conditions of the working class in Lagos of today or the smog of old Mumbai. One thing that a developing nation could do is to look at its urban planning and infrastructure, so that as the economy developed in some sort of big push as Rosenstein-Rosen’s idea of development (168) the people who were drawn from the unproductive rural subsistence agriculture into the industrializing urban center, they would have the mental and physical capacity to work productively and add to the nation’s wealth instead of magnets for do-gooder NGOs to come and lament their plight without making any real structural change. This planning is something that has worked for the Chinese state. Though the western press periodically sees writing about the “Ghost Cities” of China and hand-wringing about overdevelopment, the Chinese party has done a good job in moving the urban population from worrying about developing country problems to worrying about industrializing country problems.

Works Cited

Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Fessenden, M. (2015, February 24). See Shipping Traffic Move Through Straits Around the World. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-shipping-traffic-move-through-straits-around-world-180954399/