[PEN-L:11377] Re: "How US Trained Butchers of Timor"

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Brad, if it does refer to the book, then I agree with your
> interpretation.  I do
> not recall any calls for repression.  The article seems to suggest a different
> document.  It may or may not be wrong.  I put this out to find out
> if there was
> something to the article.
>
> Brad De Long wrote:
>
> >
> > I presume that this was the East Asia study Larry commissioned while
> > at the World Bank and that came out in book from as _The East Asian
> > Miracle_ (Washington: World Bank: 1994?).
> >
> > If so, this is a really weird reading of what seemed to me a pretty
> > good book by Nancy Birdsall and company...


The book was written at a time when certain Asian Executive Directors
of the World Bank were asking the Bank to take the idea of "Asian
values" seriously. And the book does contain some calls for... call
it "technocratization": that state-led development can be successful
if it is led by a developmental state in which the high bureaucrats
are insulated from pressures by vested interests, and that state-led
development is disastrous if (as in much of Latin America and Africa
over the past two generations) it is led by an anti-developmental
state that is the captive of rural landlords, generals, importers,
and the urban upper middle class.

In Latin America these days this argument that a developmental state
must be relatively autonomous easily turns into an argument against
landlords. In Asia these days this argument easily turns into an
argument against democracy. And for this reason I have always feared
it: the argument that technocracy needs to be *completely* insulated
from politics has seemed to me to be a leftover from the days of
Lenin and Bismarck, and to push the debate in the wrong
direction--the question is not whether, but how institutions of
economic regulation and policy making should be accountable to
voters...


Brad DeLong