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On reflection, partly prompted by the three good posts from John Lodewijks, Tony Brewer,
and Pedro Teixeira -- and the other names they mentioned -- I think I was too sweeping in
my post yesterday in stating that before the 1950s mainstream economics was the economics
of development.
 
I think that what distinguishes many of the eminent development economists of the 1950s
and early 1960s was their stress on disequilibrium and cumulative causation, whereas
mainstream economics became increasingly preoccupied with sophisticating equilibrium neo-
classical economics.
 
So far as Currie was concerned, his concept of cumulative causation and the importance of
market forces derived from his mentor Allyn Young.  But whereas Young was mainly applying
his insights to relatively advanced economies where the institutions that support mobility
and competition are already quite well developed, the LDCs require much more attention to
institutional development (as well as a lessening of economic illiteracy).
 
Within the group of cumulative causation theorists, there was (and is) still quite wide
disagreement on how it works and what the policy implications are.  For example, even
Young's own students, Currie at Harvard and Nicholas Kaldor at the LSE, disagreed on their
interpretations of Young on increasing returns for development policy.  But those two had
rather more in common than Currie did with, say, Myrdal or Singer or Prebisch.  He had
more in common with Jacob Viner and Theodore Schultz (who dwells on Currie and Young in
the preface to his last book, "A Return to Increasing Returns").
 
I think Rosenstein-Rodan was influenced by Young (he mentions him in his famous 1943
article that Paul Krugman has recently revived interest in by sophisticating it to death),
and may have known him at the LSE.  Does anyone know?
 
Roger Sandilands 
University of Strathclyde 
 
 
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