Norwegian economist, founder of The Other Canon Foundation, and the historian who has done the most to reconstruct the pre-classical developmental tradition running from Renaissance Italy through the Cameralists and the American System. His How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (2007) generalizes the retention-tradition documentation across five centuries.
Reinert’s central mechanism is the distinction between increasing-returns activities (manufacturing) and diminishing-returns activities (raw-material extraction). Development proceeds through a combination of government intervention, protectionism, and strategic investment aimed at moving a country into increasing-returns activities. Free trade is the luxury affordable only after a productive base is established. Reinert’s re-reading of the pre-classical tradition (Serra, Botero, Mun, and later the Cameralists) restores the intellectual backdrop against which Hamilton, Carey, and List were self-consciously working.
Reinert belongs on this list because he supplies the mechanism that makes the S-Curve Thesis intelligible. Comparative advantage in raw materials is a trap for the country that accepts it, because it locks the country out of increasing-returns activities. This is precisely why the throughput order defends open access to peripheral resources so aggressively, and why retention frameworks in the periphery threatened it enough to be reversed. Reinert’s work is Documented and Academic in the source brief’s terms and is one of its two primary economic-history pillars, alongside Chang.
Related pages
- Ha-Joon Chang
- Friedrich List
- Throughput, Retention, Regenerative: The Three Lineages
- The BioConomy Developmental Arc
Sources
- Reinert, E. (2007). How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor
Provenance
Extracted from Section 1 of the Research Brief: The S-Curve Thesis.