[PEN-L:11378] Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: "How US Trained Butchers of Timor"]

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >>Deborah Sklar ... cites a blueprint called The East Asian Miracle,
> >>written by US
> >>Treasury
> >>Secretary Lawrence Summers, in which he urges governments to 'insulate'
> >>themselves from 'pluralist pressures' and to suppress trade unions. This,
> >>she says, became a primary Kopassus role during the years of
> training by the
> >>United States.
> >>
> >
> >
> >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...
>
> That is a very weird caricature if that's the pub Sklar is talking
> about. The document has an interesting history - originally much more
> favorable to dirigisme than the final product - which Robert Wade
> reviewed in NLR a few years ago.
>
> Doug

Robert Wade told the story as one in which the wielders of American
state power on the White House staff and in the Treasury warped the
research of the World Bank to produce a document to serve as part of
an Ideological State Apparatus to justify neoliberalism. And Wade's
story had two heroes from the intelligentsia, two economists who
pursued truth rather than what was in the interest of power--an
outside consultant for the Bank (Joe Stiglitz) and the Bank's then
Vice-President for Development Economics (Larry Summers).

But (at least as I heard the story) the major struggles within the
Bank over the draft study took place in 1993--at which time Joe
Stiglitz on the White House staff and Larry Summers as Under
Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs were the only
senior policy makers in the administration who really cared about
development...

So I always thought that Wade's story was less than fully coherent:
how did the heroes of Act I become the villains of Act II? If it was
U.S. state power that warped Bank research products, why didn't this
warping stop as soon as key bureaucratic posts were filled by people
who had staked large chunks of their reputations on the study?

My view was that the... I shouldn't call it emasculation... neutering
not of the study but of the subheads and summary sections came about
at the hands of the Asia Operations staff of the Bank in 1993, and
largely because of a substantial block of economists with deep
experience of India who see every developmental state through the
lens of Indian slow growth since independence.

The study remains very interesting to read--I think it was Dani
Rodrik who pointed out that the most entertaining way to read it was
as a debate between the summary sections and the subheads on one
hand, and the main text on the other...


Brad