Political Economics of Developing Countries

This course is an attempt to learn the dominant ideas in why countries ``develop,’’ and then putting those ideas under scrutiny. The focus of the course will be in understanding the foundations that relate to how societies are organized, understanding the powerful forces that constrain human behavior, and how those evolve.

This course has two objectives.

First, after thinking critically about what development means, we will cover the ideas that dominate the academic and policy debate about why some countries ``develop’’ more than others, and that help understand historical trajectories. Many of those ideas were built on specific interpretations of historical episodes that marked specific societies. The course will not focus on the historical debates surrounding individual episodes, although we will talk about it when dissenting views inform different ideas of what cases development. We will focus on the ideas, and see how they may apply in a set of examples. My interest is that you go home with a rich vision of those forces, for that reason I will not spend a lot of time on technical aspects, only when those are really valuable. In that case, I will make sure that everyone is following. 

Second, we will question those ideas. We will ask the question of whether the lenses through which economics and political science have tried to explain “development” of societies believed to be “backwards” and to “fix” those are charged with presuppositions based on culture but also on doctrine. If the answer is yes, then those presuppositions could have limited our ability to grasp the logic of those societies. Having looked at this possibility, we will try to undo the learnings weaved through that lens. At the same time try something more ambitious: I will try to bring you to the frontier of research today that is shaking those foundations. This frontier is a newly explored fertile ground, with little concrete alternatives but may interesting notions that researchers are currently exploring. Those notions come mostly from anthropologists who have spent their life studying societies different than those from where the dominant ideas usually come from. They also come from scholars that have different origins than European or US, and especially in their ideas. It turns out there is a very rich set of alternative views about political economy of development which have been silenced by mainstream economics, and more generally by the West’s own narrative about the causes of its own success. We will see how the West success came at the same time that it used coercion to crush development in other societies, how that affected those societies today, and how that model may or may not work in other societies. In doing this, our objective is to start a conversation stripping these societies of barriers to their own development in their own terms set historically, but also our of barriers in own way of thinking about those societies, and even our own society.