Reddit reviews Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective
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Anthem Press
This process is called kicking away the ladder. Most developed countries nowadays indulged in IP piracy, mercantilism, protectionism, etc.. and it was not until they were established enough that they started enforcing IP laws/free market rules on other countires. For developing countries this sucks because they don't get the same boost that the developed countries had in their infancy, which stunts -if not stops- their growth significantly.
Here is a book on the matter:
http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
They're so full of shit even before this.
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279/
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/
tldr=The west tells weak nations to adopt free trade yet it did the opposite when it was growing.
If you're interested in reading more on the subject, check out Ha Joon Chang's work in Kicking Away the Ladder, for which he won the 2005 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
Ha Joon Chang, a Korean economist does an excellent book about this.
All those myths about how free market capitalism is the greatest is fucking bullshit.
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003Z9L4NA/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
IMF and the World Bank have essentially become enforcers of the current capitalist regime and basically shame countries who try to adopt self-sufficient policies that can be better for them in the long-run.
1 excellent example he gave in the books is the steel & shipbuilding industry in Korea. 50 years ago the free market wouldn't have thought of investing in them as Korea was a poor country with no resources with super risky projects. The government took the matter into their own hands and it laid the groundwork for the economic miracle that they experienced.
Countries going into debt to invest in their long-term capabilities really made sense to me, just like how you pay for your college & post-graduate fees to better your human capital. If countries always spend within their means, huge infrastructure projects will never get off the ground.
Likewise, if Indonesia's government do not invest in long-term profitable projects, we will never really become developed. The main driver of the economy will be the private market that really don't give a fuck about infrastructure and the likes if it doesn't benefit them (e.g. RGE in Riau having their own ports and electric generators for their paper mills, Lippo having their malls/hospitals/housing relatively well-connected to each other).
One can make an argument that if the government incur debts and use it inefficiently they may well make the economy worse off, but as long as the money stays within the country, it's better than not doing it at all. The book mentions the example of Suharto vs Mobutu Sese Seko who remitted most of the money to Swiss.
But I agree, Indonesia should invest more in projects like this. Debts aren't always bad. Gimana beli rumah kalo ga ada KPR? Gimana mulai bisnis kalo ga ada pinjeman bank?
You might learn want to learn a little history http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
TL;DR stealing technology and enacting trade barriers is often the best thing to do for poor countries (like America in the 1800's)
free trade when you are poor just keeps poor people poor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
From Wikipedia. Mercantilism is:
I really don't know what you mean by 'an economic system used by no one in the world'.
Or just take a look at this guy:
http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
Socialism/Communism
A People's History of the World
Main Currents of Marxism
The Socialist System
The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)
Marx for our Times
Essential Works of Socialism
Soviet Century
Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)
The Meaning of Marxism
The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)
Of the People, by the People
Why Not Socialism
Socialism Betrayed
Democracy at Work
Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)
The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)
The American Socialist Movement
Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)
It Didn't Happen Here
Eugene V. Debs
The Enigma of Capital
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action
Capitalism
The Conservative Nanny State
The United States Since 1980
The End of Loser Liberalism
Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)
Economics: A New Introduction (must read)
U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)
Kicking Away the Ladder
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Traders, Guns and Money
Corporation Nation
Debunking Economics
How Rich Countries Got Rich
Super Imperialism
The Bubble and Beyond
Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents
Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
America's Protectionist Takeoff
How the Economy was Lost
Labor and Monopoly Capital
We Are Better Than This
Ancap/Libertarian
Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)
Man, State and Economy
The Machinery of Freedom
Currently Reading
This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)
> I just finished listening to it. One of the most cerebral podcasts and there is a lot to process. I've definitely been educated. I'm very much looking forward to a lot more from /u/noname888
Thanks, there will definitely be more soon!
> That was clarity. Thanks for that awesome explanation of the recent drama on /r/AM. I'm no longer wondering wtf really happened.
You're welcome. Sometimes it's a lot easier to explain things verbally than write a long explanation.
> When he was attending Seoul University, he had quite a few Chinese classmates. When he asked them why they chose to study in Seoul University, they said that they didn't choose Seoul University because they think it's better than the Universities in China. They chose to attend Seoul University because it is more westernized. They said that they wanted to absorb the western way of thinking, take that knowledge back to China, and then help China become more competitive against the west.
I feel like this maybe has to do with the stage of industrial development in China? Today, Korea is a first-world country, so the urgency may not be there for collective growth, freeing people to think more about their own personal situation. Totally anecdotal story: I once had a long talk with a Korean college professor in the sciences. He told me that when he was a kid in the 1950s, he and his classmates would wake up every morning to build a strong Korea. If I'm remembering right, Ha Joon Chang talks about this in his book Kicking Away the Ladder. I think that during the 1950s, S. Korea as an economy was poorer than Kenya -- but today it is one of the world's most developed industrial economies. Chang attributes this to smart industrial policy that protected Korean native industries until they were strong enough to compete internationally. Basically, the enclave strategy =)
> He then moved onto the topic of Chinese acquisitions of US companies. I googled and found this graph. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on all this -- will the U.S. try to stop this? Have they already? Etc.
Chinese companies face the "problem" of holding a lot of US dollars, because for the most part they have been an export-led economy. So they want a place to put that money and get a return greater than they can get on Treasury bills (which are basically a savings account at the Federal Reserve). That pushes them to invest in the United States in things like real estate and American technology. For example, Chinese firms bought Motorola and IBM's Thinkpad division. The US government has already halted some Chinese acquisitions. About 10 years about CNOOC (Chinese oil company) tried to buy Unocal and the US government stopped them. I expect that the US government will continue to bar Chinese firms from buying assets in the US with strategic value. For example, if a Chinese firm tried to buy Cisco, I doubt the US government will let it happen. I mention Cisco because it came to light about 7 or 8 years ago that Chinese companies had built exact duplicates of Cisco routers and were selling them into the US IT market. Maybe you've heard about this? I think the FBI found out that these fake routers were backdoored. Yeah.
> Finally, he was telling me his experience while raising money for the company. He told me that in about 30% of the venture firms he's dealt with, they had at least 1 Chinese partner on the team. He also mentioned the difference between Chinese investors and US investors. U.S. investors were more concerned about how much % they would get back on their investment, whereas the Chinese investors' questions were also about the global effect the product would have (on top of the % return on their investment of course).
That's a really interesting story, and it helps me make more sense of what I'm seeing in Chinese consumer products. It seems like in the last few years, especially in mobile phones, new Chinese companies are bringing out products with international appeal.
> All of this is highly anecdotal, but he's very well educated, very well traveled, very successful so I just STFU and listened as he talked for 3 hours. I'm interested in hearing your take on all this. Maybe in another Podcast? :)
I really appreciate your comments here, I don't actually follow the China business situation that closely anymore, so it's always good to hear information from someone who is close to the action. No worries about the haste...we're all busy people!
It's called kicking away the ladder. There is a book on it apparently
https://www.amazon.in/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
He is known for going against the consensus, thanks to stuff like this, which is him defending the Industrial Policy of developing nations. Here's a debate he had which shows some of the issues with his line of thinking.
Literally, Kicking away the ladder. https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
Look, there's no need to bash my background in economics, which is irrelevant. You should be addressing the faulty logic in the government encouraging short term economic growth as well as greater integration between financial markets and real estate.
Besides, I don't think a single credible economist would argue that a sensible long-term economic growth policy is to invest in real estate over fundamentals. We're not talking basic macro, we're talking about having read historical analyses of the endogenous growth model. Even the neoclassical model of economic growth would warn against a focus on real estate. Tell me, what have you read that suggest real estate is a good bet?
You don't need lots of houses to subsidize education or R&D. There's a thing called "debt" which the government has so far been using to pay for its various overseas wars which can be used to subsidize the fundamentals of growth.
In the beginning, there was no American economy, only the British imperial economy. The plantations, or colonies, in North America were intended to help the British Empire in its rivalry with the other major powers of Europe. In the centuries before it unilaterally began to adopt free trade in 1846, Britain, like other European states, practiced mercantilism, a policy that treated the economy as an instrument of state power. Mercantilist policies included subsidies and preferential tax treatment for favored industries and their raw material inputs, efforts to obtain surpluses in precious metals like gold and silver and in high-value-added exports, and the conquest or founding of colonies whose inhabitants would provide markets and raw materials for the mother country. In his 1684 treatise England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade, the mercantilist theorist Thomas Mun wrote: “The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule: to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value.” The king in 1721 told Parliament that “it is evident that nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods and the importation of foreign raw material.”
No philosopher influenced the American Revolution more than the seventeenth-century English political thinker John Locke. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is practically a paraphrase of Locke’s writings on natural rights and liberty. In economics, Locke was a mercantilist, not a libertarian. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke says that “the pravity of Mankind . . . Obliges Men to enter into Society with one another, that by mutual Assistance, and joint Force, they may secure unto each other their Properties in the things that contribute to the Comfort and Happiness of this Life . . . But forasmuch as Men thus entering into Societies, . . . may nevertheless be deprived of them, either by the Rapine and Fraud of their Fellow-Citizens, or by the Hostile Violence of Foreigners; the remedy of this Evil consists in Arms, Riches, and Multitude of Citizens; the Remedy of the other in Laws.” For Locke, as for other early-modern mercantilists, military power, economic growth, and population growth were mutually reinforcing, and all three enhanced the ability of the state to defend its people in an anarchic world. In a journal entry in 1674, Locke wrote: “The chief end of trade is riches and power, which beget each other. Riches consists in plenty of moveables, that will yield a price to foreigners, and are not likely to be consumed at home, but especially in plenty of gold and silver. Power consists in numbers of men, and ability to maintain them. Trade conduces to both these by increasing your stock and your people, and they each other.”
The policy of mercantilism that Britain shared with other European empires included a division of labor in which British manufacturers sold finished products to a captive market of consumers in the American colonies, Ireland, and India, which in return exported raw materials and food to the British Isles. In 1721, the British Board of Trade told the king: “Having no manufactories of their own, their . . . situation will make them always dependent on Great Britain.” The British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who sympathized with the American colonists, summarized the policy: “These colonies were evidently founded in subservience to the commerce of Great Britain . . . On the same idea it was contrived that they should send all their products to us raw, and in their first state; and that they should take every thing from us in the last stage of manufacture.” Adam Smith made a similar observation in The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776, the same year in which the American colonies that would form the United States declared their independence: “The liberality of England, however, towards the trade of her colonies has been confined chiefly to what concerns the market for their produce, either in its rude state, or in what may be called the very first stage of manufacture. The more advanced or more refined manufactures even of the colony produce, the merchants and manufactures of Great Britain choose to reserve to themselves, and have prevailed upon the legislature to prevent their establishment in the colonies, sometimes by high duties, and sometimes by absolute prohibitions.”
Beginning in the seventeenth century, England (which became Great Britain with the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) sought to prevent the development of colonial manufacturing that might compete with British manufacturing by a variety of methods. The Navigation Acts, passed in 1651, 1660, and 1663, required all English trade to be carried in English ships with majority-English crews. All items in “enumerated” categories going to or from the American colonies had to be unloaded in Britain, taxed, and then reexported. The colonists were permitted to buy only British goods or goods that had been reexported from Britain.
The imperial government outlawed American exports that competed with British manufactured goods. For example, the 1699 Woolens Act forbade the sale of woolen cloth outside of the place where it was woven. This destroyed the Irish woolen industry and prevented the emergence of one in the American colonies. In 1732, Britain similarly destroyed an emerging beaver-hat industry in the colonies by outlawing the export of hats to other colonies or foreign countries. When Parliament lifted a ban on exports of pig iron and bar iron from the colonies in 1750, it outlawed further development of the industry. But the colonists ignored the prohibition and by 1775 the annual production of iron in the colonies, most of it for domestic consumption, was roughly the same as in Britain, despite the smaller colonial population.
Even as it banned manufactured exports from the American colonies to Britain or other parts of the empire, the imperial government encouraged the export of raw materials from the colonies to Britain. Import duties on wood and hemp from the American colonies to Britain were abolished. The colonists also received bounties, or subsidies, for exporting raw materials. Timber from the abundant forests of North America was particularly important. The purpose of regulation was to create a buyer’s market in raw materials and a seller’s market in manufactured goods for British industry.
Hindering the transfer of technology from Britain to America was another British mercantilist technique. In 1719, Britain banned the emigration of skilled workers in industries including steel, iron, brass, watchmaking, and wool. The law punished suborning, or recruitment, of skilled workers for employment abroad with fines or imprisonment. Skilled immigrants who did not return to Britain within six months of being warned by a British official faced the confiscation of their goods and property and the withdrawal of their citizenship.13 Britain followed its ban on the emigration of skilled workers with a ban on the export of wool and silk technology in 1750. In 1781 and 1785, the act was enlarged into a comprehensive ban on machinery of all kinds. The ban on skilled emigrants was repealed only in 1825, while the ban on technology exports lasted until 1842.
Evaluated in terms of its goal of fostering domestic manufacturing at the expense of other countries, Britain’s mercantilist system was a great success. Between the reign of the Tudors and the nineteenth century, Britain’s state-sponsored program of economic development turned the island nation first into a commercial and financial powerhouse and then into the first superpower of the machine age. But Britain’s imperial trade laws thwarted American manufacturers and frustrated American merchants, who frequently smuggled goods from other colonies and countries. The government also antagonized the colonists after the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) of 1756 to 1763, when it attempted to ban white settlement of large areas of the trans-Appalachian West, in order to avert conflict with the Indians. This enraged land-hungry Anglo-American frontiersmen as well as rich American colonials like George Washington who owned vast tracts of western land. These economic conflicts, along with struggles over power and status, helped to ignite the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783.
I first heard it from Ha Joon Chang in his book called 'Kicking Away the Ladder'. He uses it in a context of countries, but I feel that it can apply to people also.
First, you didn't answer my question. Do you think private reinvestment of a portion of their profits is more beneficial to the communities in which they operate than simple using that money for increased wages, pensions and benefits?
>>If efficiency comes at the cost of less wages, later retirements, shorter and closer-to-home vacations, and so on - what is the point? How does it benefit us?
>Is this a result of efficiency or a result of globalization? If globalization is reducing poverty in the developing world at the cost of making people in the rich world poorer, is that OK?
It's clearly a result of this quest for faux-efficiency. We've whittled down unions, stagnated in mandating vacation time and minimum wage increases, privatized a fair amount of the public sector and refused to nationalize some other ones. Globalization and free trade can be blamed for many things, but they are simply manifestations of the expansion of private businesses ability to undermine comprehensive labour and trade laws.
I also don't think that globalization helps poorer nations. I suggest these books, or if you aren't so inclined, at least this talk.
Climate change is just another excuse, in the long list of excuses, to kick away the ladder.
I'd suggest this one from Rodrik as essential - it's very easy to read:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Globalization-Paradox-Dani-Rodrik/dp/019965252X
Stiglitz, Globalisation and Its Discontents, although it's not quite as current. The one below is a bit boring to read but makes some crucial points:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Institutions/dp/1843310279/ref=pd_sim_14_31?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3QQA6QGWH0P1DNY5WQQP
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
​
You are correct, sir! By the way, this author is awesome. Very informative about such things.
Excelente lectura.
Una visión más extensa que viene a cuestionar también fuertemente la ideología cuasi-religiosa según la cuál "la mejor política industrial es no tener política industrial" y reivindica el papel que ha tenido el Estado en conducir todos los procesos de industrialización exitosos de la historia (con unas cuatas excepciones) es Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective.
El autor se dedica a estudiar no cómo dicen que se debe alcanzar la modernidad, sino qué han hecho los países que efectivamente la alcanzaron, y ve la enrome discrepancia entre lo que ahora los países industrializados señalan que hay que hacer en forma de receta y lo que esos mismos países hicieron para llegar hasta ahí. En otras palabras: "Has lo que te digo, no lo que yo hago"
Magyarul- soha? Nem hiszem, hogy valaha is megkozelitjuk oket. Nemcsak a sajat inkompetenciank es korrupcionk miatt- nekik nagyon nincs erdekeben a dolog. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Institutions/dp/1843310279 elegge informativ volt az ugyben.)
> Lmao, imagine writing that wall of text an then breezing over significant point in the 20th century with "got smashed up" like the investment and reforms it brought about isn't directly responsible for Japan's thriving economy.
And the significant difference between Astante Kingdom and Japan? Japan wasn't colonised.
> Korea emerged from Japanese rule as an agrarian society.
And what happened in the 60s? They returned to the growth rates as before because of the policies I outlined. State intervention, death penalty for capital flight. As did every developed country including this one and the United States.
The United States was the most protectionist country in history, when it was at the peak of its powers it started touting free-trade.
If anyone wants to read the history:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Institutions/dp/1843310279
Yo, you need to read about tariffs and why developed countries have all had tariffs in the past. https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
You're just being greatly mislead by politicians.
I should check that out, he's one of my favorite economists. Read this one a while back http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=1RN1VWGM605TDNRRT60H
This is the most bullshit comment I've ever seen on this sub which has been upvoted.
The UN is pretty much ran by the Americans and is pretty much a tool used to keep developing nations down.
Remember that only poor African nations have their warlords tried for crimes against humanity in the Haque while Tony Blair continues to sell oil for Saudi nations after starting a war that has led to the utter disintegration of a couple of nations and an incredibly unstable middle east.
Remember in the 80's when the UN found the US guilty of crimes against humanity in Nicaragua? What happened there? The US just walked away from that ruling and dismissed it out of hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States#Significance
Cambridge professor and top economist Ha-Joon Chang wrote a pretty insightful book on how first world nations use the United Nations alongside other international organisations (IMF etc.) to kick the ladder away from developing nations entitled, funnily enough,
Kicking Away The Ladder : Development Strategy in Historical Perspective: Policies and Institutions for Economic Development in Historical Perspective
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Institutions-Globalization/dp/1843310279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417697390&sr=8-1&keywords=kicking+the+ladder
Relevant and highly recommended: "Kicking Away the Ladder"
>If I expend energy carrying a rock down a mountain does my labor give it value?
I would like individual losses to be socialized to encourage a culture of innovation. Money should always pay your material cost but the maslow's head decides what have value, scredules objectives and propose improvements.
​
>forces of supply and demand inform the market of what goods and services are desired by the economy and how much profit there is to be made in goods and services
Free marketing gold rule I guess. "Please dont bail out banks". Aka Privatizing Profits And Socializing Losses of big ones.
"Development Strategy in Historical Perspective" say:
>(...) His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used.
I'd say look up quantitative easing on wikipedia then youtube. Maybe just youtube. If you read something and it doesn't seem to make sense just follow up on it.
Hmm and probably learn about how Western nations stifle the development of developing countries. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1843310279
That book and others by Ha-Joon Chang are pretty good.
Are you American? Matt Talibi is good, all the stuff I read isn't for people without trading knowledge.
www.nakedcapitalism.com is good but the author is there to cover news for the knowledgeable so it probably won't make sense to you
Chairman Mao died in 1976. This came after 10 years of the ‘cultural revolution’, an economically disastrous movement that sought to further entrench communism in the country. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping took over and it is from this point that China started on its course of development/capitalism.
Foreign money, often from Chinese Disapora (known as the bamboo network) flooded into China.
China did not go for outright free market liberalisation. No. Infant industries were protected from foreign competition behind high import tariffs (average of 55% in the 1980s) and firms were given state support through low interest loans in order to develop certain industries. Industries like manufacturing. China became the world’s manufacturer (particularly of low-tech goods but they may soon move up the value chain and produce more high tech goods). Furthermore they put in place capital controls to stop money from leaving China.
Importantly, if China had been a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which it only became in 2001, it would not have been able to hide behind high tariff barriers to protect infant industries.
This book by Ha-Joon Change talks about how the US and UK developed by nurturing industries behind high tariff barriers, but now promote the idea of trade liberalisation, which is at odds with how they developed (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Institutions-Globalization/dp/1843310279/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285252397&sr=1-1)
China would also stipulate that foreign firms had to do a certain amount of technology transfer (another thing that you can’t do so easily when you are in the WTO).
China’s growth was quick. “China has set a new record – per capita GDP in China doubled within only 9 years between 1978 and 1987, and doubled again in another 9 years between 1987 and 1996” (Cai Fang and Wang Meiyan, ‘How Fast and How Far Can China’s GDP Grow?’, China : An Economics Research Study Series, vol. 3, 2004, p. 2.)
China used its huge trade surplus to prop up the US spending boom. So Americans buy Chinese stuff, with money borrowed from China, that China got from Americans buying their stuff.
TLDR: In 1978 China decided to follow a capitalist route. Foreign money, often from Chinese overseas flooded into the country. Infant industries were protected from competition from other countries behind high tariff barriers. China was able to do this because it wasn’t in the WTO. China integrated itself into the global economy without free trade liberalization.
Kicking away the ladder is something that privileged groups have been doing for a long time even on a geopolitical basis
While there is some truth to the original thought, it may be misguided because the prior generations may not be the correct generations to point your fingers at. All these programs for seniors are really peculiar when they're not the most vulnerable financially of demographics in the US by any measure
I've got to be honest, though I agree entirely with the theory presented in my previous post, I wasn't actually stating my own speculative opinion, I was (accurately) parroting the empirically based works of Chang. I think that if you read his book [Kicking Away The Ladder] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Institutions-Globalization/dp/1843310279), or for a more accessible work [Bad Samaritans] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Samaritans-Secrets-Nations-Prosperity/dp/1905211376) you would be hard pressed to disagree with his account of economic history.
Indeed, almost all predominant advocates of free trade begrudgingly accept Chang's view, but counter that such policies are no longer possible nowadays, given how globalized and intertwined the various national economies are. For an example of this kind of argument see Martin Wolf's [Why Globalization Works] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Globalization-Works-Yale-Nota-Bene/dp/0300107773).
I didn't really want to challenge your various retorts of my previous comment, because as I stated it's not my argument. But I would like to say that I think it is fair to describe your depiction of South Korea as inaccurate. Whilst true that Korea produce goods that are exported to other developed countries, this is no bad thing - all developed countries trade between each other, as it has been shown to be the most efficient way to produce things. Also, you imply that Korea has a particularly unequal society, but a cursory look at the national [gini-coefficient rankings] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality), which ranks countries by income equality, shows that Korea has a more equal society than Canada, France, Belgium, the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, and a significantly greater level of equality than the United States.
Boy do I have a book for you!
Kicking Away the Ladder by Ha Joon Chang.
He's a 'heterodox' economist, in other words he doesn't agree with the 95% of economists who are writing at the moment.
He basically argues that economies have grown because they developed using protectionist policies. Then, when they were strong, forced countries to open up to their advantage, effectively 'kicking away the ladder'. The book is thoroughly well researched and well written.
Now, technological advancement. For a fun idea of this I like Brenner who writes lots about economics and how the crash happened. He also wrote a LOT about how capitalism originally developed from Feudalism: Here's a link to a copy http://www.scribd.com/doc/74325361/BrennerPropertyandProgress
Basically he's arguing that it's nothing to do with technological developments but developments in relations of production that decide social relations, what he calls 'social property relations'. It's a bit of a dull read because he's REALLY methodical but interesting because it shows how capitalism developed - it's about control from the top.
Now! To more recent times. How did America get ahead? I reccomend two articles: The American Road to Capitalism by Charles Post which talks about slave economies and how it held America back as well as how the petty agronomy was central to the development of industry (if you've read the Brenner this will sound familiar in an odd way).
The other piece I really like is by Kozul-Wright called the myth of Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, it's in a book called he Role of the State in Economic Change. He argues that America did well because it ignored Britain's 'laissez-faire' mentality and instead created a strong domestic economy backed up by a strong state which helped to develop an 'agro-industrial complex' that was the back bone. A strong state had money to spend plus it had the ability to change property laws to help the common good (think about eminent domain in developing rail accross the US which was so imperative to it's growth). Once it got big internally the state began to fade away.
Now! We come to the modern day! Technological advancement, why is it some countries roar ahead? For this I reccomend Block and Keller's excellent (recent) article "Where do Innovations Come from?". Turns out if you look at the most promising innovations of recent times they've all come from government funded labs or from universities - the private sector has little to do with R&D and technological development. They argue that the State, even if not a direct and single funder (because there are so many state and federal bodies in the US) acts as a 'networked state' that provides information and backs certain people to give others confidence in their innovations and this is central to keeping ahead.
Hope that helps! (p.s this is not economics so much as a leftward leaning political economy which seeks to explain a lot of things economics tries to gloss over).
Jews were integrated into whiteness during the 1950s and 1960s, especially after the 1967 Six Day War. Great book: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/How-Jews-Became-White-Folks-and-What-That-Says-Abo,3228.aspx
The Japanese were incredibly fortunate in that China and North Korea arose as Communist powers in the post-war period. Suddenly, Americans were willing to spend billions of dollars aiding them. Japan in particular had a strong pre-war history of using the same economic techniques that America had to become strong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%29) while most countries are advised to open their markets to western powers instead. See: https://www.amazon.ca/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
Do not forget for a second that when the US was a growing economy that they did cheat, steal, use child labour, use slave labour, pollute, etc. But now that the US has climbed to the top they are Kicking Away the Ladder.