Revisiting Hirschman on Development Assistance and Unbalanced Growth

It is useful from time to time to revisit the pioneers in a field. The richness of their original thought is often diminished as new specialists in a field are educated or, rather, trained. Stylized caricatures and toy models out-compete nuanced multidisciplinary narratives in the competition for shelf-space in textbooks. After the students ingest the textbooks and go forth in the discipline as properly trained specialists, they are hard put just to keep up with the latest publications and to do their own bit to push the frontier forward. Outside of those inclined to intellectual history, the specialists have little occasion to go back to revisit the pioneers. In the field of economic development, Albert Hirschman is perhaps the prime example of a thinker who has deliberately avoided the toy models that can be readily absorbed by graduate students and their professors - sometimes to the chagrin of the latter.