Thursday, October 06, 2022

He deleted the comment and the exchange that followed.  They're here
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I left a long comment at Zachary Carter's post on DeLong's book. I kept a copy if he deletes it. 

Carter's review of DeLong in Dissent

Britain was not so generous with the rest of the world. For India, one price of expanded trade with the British Isles was the deliberate deindustrialization of the Indian economy. India ceased to manufacture its own textiles, and instead provided raw materials to Britain, which handled the factory work. Under the traditional free trade theory of comparative advantage, this process should have maximized the wealth of both countries.... 

By that traditional definition slavery should have maximized the wealth of slaves. The whole thing's a mess.

DeLong has a tag. Comparative advantage doesn't but Dani Rodrik and Angus Deaton do. That should cover it.
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And I remembered this from the NYT on September 27th. The worst was deleted later.

The failure in Iraq marked a larger blow to America’s influence in the world than the loss of the Vietnam War, and the recent and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, after an effort of more than 20 years of democracy building, did great damage, argued Stefano Pontecorvo, the senior NATO civilian in Afghanistan and one of the last to leave after the Taliban takeover.

At the height of the war, the United States spent $3 billion a year, and for nothing, he said. “The problem with exporting democracy is that it is not natural to these countries,” he said. “You can’t impose your values — you have to accommodate them to the values of the country. It took Britain 250 years to build democracy in India, and we had 20.

From Isaac Chotiner and The Print

New Delhi: A New York Times article has removed a reference to colonial Britain’s alleged hand in building “democracy in India” over 250 years after a counterblast on social media.

The article published Tuesday quoted former NATO diplomat Stefano Pontecorvo as saying, “You can’t impose your values – you have to accommodate them to the values of the country. It took Britain 250 years to build democracy in India, and we had 20.”

The quote implies Britain’s 200-year repression of India had helped infuse egalitarian values in the country.

The quote on India is also prefaced with the observation: “The problem with exporting democracy is that it is not natural to these countries.”

The quote was first shared on Twitter by Carnegie South Asia director Milan Vaishnav and later retweeted by Observer Research Foundation director and son of India’s External Affairs minister S. Jaishankar, Dhruva Jaishankar.

The US was no more interested in bringing democracy to Afghanistan—or anywhere else—than the British were interested in bringing democracy to India.

We'll have to wait for an Indian or South Asian, non-white, non-European, "perspective" on DeLong's new book.

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