Or, more precisely with the South American exmple: a few of them would continue to work for a pittrance, while the rest would end up without land and job and move to urban slums. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
From 1921, Prebisch began to use the metaphor of core and periphery to describe the geography of international trade, with the core being Europe and the U.S. and the periphery being the rest of the planet (what Marx called the "peasant nations"). A brief stay in London, negotiating with the English over a new trade treaty, showed Prebisch real power: Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, who answered neither to the political parties nor to the monarch. Prebisch wanted such a post in Argentina, one that would allow him to put his insights over monetary policy and international trade to work without the vacillation of electoral politics. He did get a sinecure at the Central Bank of Argentina after his plan (the Economy Recovery Plan of 1933) allowed his country to tread a middle ground between protectionism and "free trade". As Dosman puts it, "Prebisch certainly cared less about textbooks than evolving a new balance between industry and agriculture in the uncharted waters of the Great Depression." From his perch as the Director of the Central Bank, Prebisch spent the next decade developing a monetary policy for the periphery, which was largely based on pragmatism rather than on any established theory. For this he earned few friends and many enemies, notably among the permanent bureaucracy in the U.S. Prebisch's ferocious nationalism prevented him from allowing Argentina's economy to bend its knee before either London or Washington, and this bothered the latter so greatly that Prebisch was barred from attending the Bretton Woods conference to set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
A brief stay in London, negotiating with the English over a new trade treaty, showed Prebisch real power: Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, who answered neither to the political parties nor to the monarch. Prebisch wanted such a post in Argentina, one that would allow him to put his insights over monetary policy and international trade to work without the vacillation of electoral politics. He did get a sinecure at the Central Bank of Argentina after his plan (the Economy Recovery Plan of 1933) allowed his country to tread a middle ground between protectionism and "free trade". As Dosman puts it, "Prebisch certainly cared less about textbooks than evolving a new balance between industry and agriculture in the uncharted waters of the Great Depression."
From his perch as the Director of the Central Bank, Prebisch spent the next decade developing a monetary policy for the periphery, which was largely based on pragmatism rather than on any established theory. For this he earned few friends and many enemies, notably among the permanent bureaucracy in the U.S. Prebisch's ferocious nationalism prevented him from allowing Argentina's economy to bend its knee before either London or Washington, and this bothered the latter so greatly that Prebisch was barred from attending the Bretton Woods conference to set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
re: The Life and Times of Raul Prebisch, 1901-1986 by Edgar Dosman Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
