But stating the tacit assumption reveals the problem: that would be a silly reading of history. All institutional change involves unintended consequences, and the more wide-reaching the change, the greater the potential for some of the unintended consequences to be both strong and malignant.

And even if it were an entirely deliberate choice, there is still the "Dear Liza" conundrum - if it were possible to identify precisely the institutional changes required to make the society functional in that respect, implementing those changes in precisely the way required would itself require a foundation of an institutional capacity for institutional improvement which, by observation, does not exist.

IOW, there's a hole in the bucket, and you need the bucket to fetch the water to wet the whetstone to sharpen the knife to cut the straw to patch the hole in the bucket.

Following the experience of post-WWII reconstruction in Europe and Japan, there were high hopes in the 50's and 60's of lending the bucket to allow new buckets to be made (so to speak - no we are out of the range of the song and use sharpened axes to cut down trees and sharpened saws to cut them into timber) ... but it turns out that reconstructing in a society that was already a functioning industrial society and developing industrial capacities in nations that were not previously functioning industrial societies are quite different challenges.

And as it turned out, the most successful industrial development in the past fifty years occurred in a country that was locked out of the mainstream development program in the 50's and 60's, but which had a massive agrarian revolution in the 50's and 60's following a massive land reform and which was developing in a society which previously had a highly developed commercial economy.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.