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The Interlocking of Social and Economic Factors in Asian Development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Nathan Keyfitz
Nathan Keyfitz*
Affiliation:
Ottawa
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Extract

Any planned growth is embedded in a set of institutions and attitudes which come from the past; in Asia a rich past obtrudes into the present in every aspect of life. One can see the layers of history lying one on the other in both material and mental life, in every field from archaeology to arithmetic, from ethics to economics. There is no hope of doing justice to this past in any summary that can be included here, but it may be useful to frame remarks about the future in terms of a simplified account of the three Asias which this century inherits.

The three Asias of the past. The periods of Asian history are most easily described in agricultural terms: Stone Age shifting cultivation; advanced irrigated rice culture which had spread to most of the more heavily settled portions of the continent hundreds of years ago; plantations established under imperial rule. In recent years all of these forms of agriculture and associated industry have merged into nation-states created since the Second World War.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , February 1959 , pp. 34 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1959

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Footnotes

*

This paper is based on an address that was given by the author at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Edmonton, June 5, 1958. Acknowledgment is due to Dallas H. Steinthorson, in discussion with whom the conceptions of this paper were elaborated. The agencies for whom the writer has worked are not responsible for any portion of the paper. The ideas put forward in what follows are not new. Durkheim's sub-contractual conditions of contract may be interpreted to include most of the conditions that must be met if a competitive order of society is to be effective. George H. Mead describes how social interaction creates at an early age a self in each one of us, and Max Weber's demonstration of the association of religion with the rise of Western capitalism is an example of the way in which the formation of an appropriate self must come before selfishness is constructive. Adam Smith is popularly associated with an “invisible hand” that operates under any and all circumstances, but his writing pays a good deal of attention to the specific conditions under which laissez-faire will do what is expected of it.

References

1 Myrdal, Gunnar, Economic Theory and Under-Developed Regions (London, 1957).Google Scholar

2 Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Morris, C. W. (Chicago, 1934).Google Scholar

3 Power, Eileen, Report to the Trustees of the Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowship, September 1920–September 1921 (London, 1921).Google Scholar