Technical Progress and Its Fruits: The Idea of Development in the Works of Raul Prebisch
In the past decade in Latin America, especially in the countries of the Southern Cone, there has been a simultaneous reflourishing of political authoritarianism and orthodox economic thinking, with far-reaching consequences. In the minds of many scholars and statesmen who have supported this process, there are various reasons to explain its existence from a theoretical viewpoint and to justify it from a political point of view. At the heart of these reasons is the crisis of the reformist and progressive democratic governments, which are alleged to have committed two major errors. First, they have not been capable of resolving the contradiction between the accumulation requirements of their ambitious economic and social development strategies and the pressures of the mobilized masses who support them politically, and this has had a decisive effect on their rate of economic growth. This contradiction has led them to commit a second error, consisting of the demagogically heterodox management of their economic policies, which has resulted in serious monetary, fiscal, and balance-of-payments disequilibria that have accelerated the economic and political crisis of these regimes, ending by making them weak, ineffective, and illegitimate.' The justification of political authoritarianism arises from this crisis: ecoThe author is a member of the Economic Commission for Latin America, but this article reflects his personal opinions and not necessarily those of the organization. This article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Evolutionary