16 - Expertise Far from Home

Summary

Chapter 16 is the third of three chapters to reflect on the rise of economic expertise during the twentieth century. In this chapter the debate surrounding Gunnar Myrdal’s book Asian Drama is used to position Tinbergen in the debates about development planning and neocolonialism. The critique of Myrdal’s book by anthropologist Clifford Geertz is used to contrast the way in which economic expertise developed in the Netherlands, and how it was imposed in former colonial countries by the international community. It is argued that an important set of preconditions such as social integration, broad political parties (people’s parties), and a strong civil society that made the success of economic expertise possible in the Netherlands were absent in many of the developing countries in which Tinbergen worked. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Tinbergen’s universalism, which had attractive moral features, but ran into limits as a program of economic policy.