Scholars interested in economic development are usually asked about policy recommendations to improve the standard of living the populations living in poor countries. This is an easy and at the same time a difficult question to answer. It is easy because the economic and the development scholarly literature has amassed a large amount of evidence regarding development policy effectiveness. And the scholar just needs to suggest some of these policies, for instance improving the quality of basic education. The difficulty of this question is if those individual policies work together (see the theory of the second best) and whether there is a political consensus that will allow the implementation of such policies.
This political consensus by its turn depends on the perceived causes of underdevelopment (colonialism, small capital stock, illiteracy, declining terms of trade, and so forth), on the political capital of each segment of the society, and on the goals to be achieved by development policies. Since the political consensus is multi-faceted and perhaps cumbersome problem, scholars and policy-makers approach conceptually it through the use of paradigms, in which scholars model the not only the entire economy and society of a developing country but also its economic and political relationship with the rest of the world. In this normative analysis, scholars end up choosing the winners and the losers of the proposed development policies according to the scholars’ values and beliefs.
One of these paradigms is the Third Worldism, which was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s. Fred Siegel (Manhattan Institute) wrote a very interesting piece about some of the key people related to the Third Worldism movements and its ramifications. I urge interested readers to read Fred Siegel’s article.