Word: bauers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bauer is the field's iconoclast. For more than two decades he has provided a counterpoint to whatever tune others in his discipline happen to be playing. In his latest work, Reality and Rhetoric he goes back to grinding his familiar over the belief that the Third World's problems can be solved by a return to the free market...
This trip down the memory lane of neo-classical economics has several elements. First Bauer writes, the rote of government in economic hie must be reduced. Prosperity will be created by the free enterprise system, "in which firms and individuals largely determine what is produced and consumed." Bauer also promotes the ideal of comparative advantage, the concept that nations should produce what they can make most cheaply. For most poor nations this means exporting raw materials and agricultural products. Bauer deems the idea of Third World industrialization inefficient and declares that it is "more likely to retard economic development than...
...solution to Third World problems suggested by Bauer represents a unique vision of less developed nations. While most development thinkers regard the effects of economic relations between rich and poor nations as a mixed bag, Bauer views the role of trade through rose-colored glasses. For him, the Third World ought to be thankful for the role the West has played in pulling it out of the stone age. He dismisses foreign aid by rich nations as guilt offerings for a crime they did not commit, and characterizes Third World groups generally as parasites organized to such dry their former...
...essays in Reality and Rhetoric are full of promises of doom should the Third World continue on its present course. But Bauer's failure is that he never displays a full under standing of why these countries act the way that they do now, and whey an economic logic stronger than Bauer's prevents them from changing course as radically as he proposes...
...example, in an essay on Niggrlan development, Bauer denies the need for poorer nations to industrialize. This is in agreement with the classical economic view that a nation should do what it is best at. But Bauer's recommendation suggests that Third World nations join a system rigged against them. Much like American farmers. Third World nations find the prices they receive for their products seldom keep pace with the prices of the things they must buy to satisfy their populations. They export items whose prices are largely dictated to them by richer industrial powers. The only group of exporters...