[PEN-L:9569] Re: Re: Re: Re: My Ideologies

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
>> It's no surprise that Angus
>> Maddison dubs the U.S. in the early 20th century a "heavy protectionist"
>> country. This strategy of import-substitution was of course successful in
>> insulating US business from British competition, allowing them to overtake
>> and exceed Britain (partly for reasons beyond the scope of this note).

Michael Pollak asks:
>Jim, if you've written anything on this, I'd love to read it.

I haven't written anything exactly on this. For years, I've lectured in
course on "development economics" (third world economies), US economic
history, and political economy, bringing in a lot my general reading and
research.

I guess you're asking about the parenthetical remark. My main question is
why the US, which started out behind the UK in 1800, rose to the top and
beat the UK at its own game. In addition to grabbing a pretty chunk of real
estate from the American Indians (and related political-economic factors,
like benefiting from having a horde of well-educated and motivated
immigrants), the US benefited from (1) tariff walls, protecting US mfg from
the UK (this was true especially after 1860, but the natural protectionism
of high transportation costs helped a bit before that); (2) the fact that
the "technological gap" vis-a-vis the UK was pretty small in 1800 and even
1860; and (3) the fact that the US internal market was relatively large due
to the relatively high wages for free white men and a relatively prosperous
small-farm sector. The large domestic market meant that the protectionism
didn't encourage the bloated monopolies that exist in many other countries
pursuing import-substituting industrialization. The small technological gap
meant that the US didn't have that far to go. Note that all of the
comparisons are done relative to countries that also pursued
import-substitution.

I have a long manuscript (from which the reference to Maddison was
excerpted) which includes some of this stuff. Unfortunately, I haven't
found a place that publishes long semi-popular discourses (though a mag. is
considering it as we speak). If people want a copy, it's at

http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/talks/Krugman.html

It tries to present a primer on Globalization, structured as a critique of
some fellow at MIT who's been in the news once or twice.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html