Work & Academics

Economic History of the U.S. To 1900

When reading Jack London’s The Iron Heel, my high school days of music are brought to mind. I remember one of the more musically talented high school punk bands of the time: Picnic with a Gun. The singer/lyricist was a young man destined to be a politician. For reasons of stubbornness, over-certainty, and a strong belief in his propaganda, not too many people managed to win an argument against him (if they even bothered trying). One of his famous lyrics stated, “You say I’ve got a big mouth because I’m not afraid to use it.” He was a member of the upper middle class. He lived on the outskirts of Montecito. His parents were both lawyers. He was half-black and quick to bring up race distinctions. He believed that “socialism is the answer, and we’ve got to fight.” He was a fun person to listen to, and he came to mind when reading of Avis Everhard’s accounts of Jack London’s Socialist hero, Ernest Everhard. Their life histories are different, however, with Everhard having come from a poor beginning. But their target audience, a relatively homogenized, educated middle class, and their economic story of class struggles and socialist uprisings, were very similar.

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Introduction

The goal of this paper is to present the reader with a brief background of the global experience with sustainable development in the past fifty years. Considering the broad range of issues involved with sustainable development, I decided to divide the paper into ten interconnected sections, each of which would be worthy of extensive analysis on its own.

I will begin by introducing the notion of sustainable development and introducing some of the questions that arise from with our ever-changing “new world order.” Following this will be a brief discussion of the first development experiences, which started as development assistance to help Europe recover following World War II. The success here provided confidence to expand assistance in other parts of the world. The third section covers the changes in the organization of society that provided the environment in which Western wealth and growth originated.

With this basic background of growth and development, I will then begin to present some of the more current issues concerning sustainable development. The fourth section addresses concerns that globalization will result in the extinction of individual cultures, with the world’s cultures ultimately being standardized. Section five is focused around knowledge inequalities and the technology gap between the developed countries and the developing ones. Multinational corporations are often accused of not contributing anything (in terms of such things as transferring management skills and technological knowledge) to the countries in which they operate. Section six briefly looks at these concerns. Inappropriate approaches towards growth also have severe consequences on the environment. A few of the environmental problems stemming from growth are the topics of section seven. Section eight raises questions about the measurement of the standard of living and discusses some recent ideas for improvement. This is followed by a short discussion of a fundamental question that should be asked when analyzing development experiments: does growth help the poor? With that question asked, I will end the paper with the convergence theory—that is, that the incomes of the late starters to growth converge quite rapidly with those of the leaders.

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