Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (47 page)

The survey’s history would affect Hirschman’s experience and observations. Getting a chief on short notice was not easy. McCloy used all his contacts. He asked several business moguls, then turned to Lionel Robbins, the anti-Keynesian economist from the London School of Economics, pointing out that this was an opportunity for Robbins to play a formative role in bank policy and new “activity in [the] development field.” Robbins thought about it for a weekend. Then he declined. In the end, McCloy found his man in a Canadian-born economist, Lauchlin Currie, an influential Keynesian and prominent New Dealer. He might have been slightly at odds with bankers’ orthodoxy, but he had a lot of experience
in administration and international financial relations. The close assistant to Treasury secretary Harry Dexter White during the 1944 negotiations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1941 he had headed the Economic Mission to China. Brilliant and experienced, Currie also had the missionary trademark. Currie did not just have confidence, he exuded it;
he
required no personal conversion. Currie was also suspected of dealing secrets to the Soviets, conveying information to Elizabeth Bentley, a Russian agent, and charged with having undermined the Kuomintang government with his policy recommendations during the war. Investigations into his past began in earnest in late 1949, by which time, for all intents and purposes, Currie was moving to Colombia, where he would settle down. It was one of many ironies of the Cold War that Currie and Hirschman, the “fellow traveler” and the seasoned skeptic, would wind up entangled in distant Colombia, clashing over the future of the whole enterprise of economic development.
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Once named as mission chief, Currie expanded the scope of the survey to include designing a master plan to raise the standard of living for the entire country. Bank officials were skeptical; this was not what Toro had proposed, though he was eager to aggrandize. But they acceded, laying the tracks for a problem regarding the place of local knowledge in the business of economic missionizing. The size of the team expanded to fourteen members (none of them Colombian) ranging from experts on agriculture to railways. To help the experts, locals provided the “staff.”

If a plan was the goal, Currie was clear about what the plan was to accomplish: “a coordinated attack on the problem of poverty,” he proclaimed. He quickly set to clearing the ground for his grand scheme. The mission arrived in Colombia on July 10, 1949, spent four months touring the country conducting its research, and had a draft of its findings available in March 1950. In all, it took a year to assemble a team, conduct research, evaluate alternatives, elicit feedback, and produce a lifeless 600-page tome, impressive mainly in its ability to amass vast quantities of data.
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The response in Colombia was no less hurried. Within weeks, the government announced the National Planning Council. Whatever one might think about this hurried approach to “planning,” there was no shortage
of enthusiasm. Eugene R. Black, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and the new president of the World Bank, threw his weight behind the mission’s recommendations. He extolled the “unbiased analysis … by a competent group of independent experts” to Colombian president Ospina and applauded Colombia’s swift response in “already taking active measures in line with the Mission’s recommendations to obtain expert assistance in the vitally important task of effecting improvements in governmental organization and administration.”
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The Basis of a Development Program for Colombia
was an archetypal document from an age of humanitarian missions. Coded in the scientistic rhetoric of economic missionaries, it argued that the root of the problem was a vicious poverty cycle: the poor were poor because they were unhealthy and illiterate. The result was that too many people produced for current consumption, yielding little savings for capital growth. Colombia not only needed an infusion of capital from abroad, it had to tear down a wide range of intractable obstacles, such as the land tenure system, and make up for others with rural credits and energy and transportation improvements. What was needed was a comprehensive “generalized attack” to break “the vicious cycle of poverty, ignorance, ill-health and low productivity.” The emphasis was on aggressive and coordinated improvements on all fronts simultaneously to avoid distortions, bottlenecks, and lags. Nothing piecemeal; this was a mission. What the report echoed was a growing academic current, propounded above all by the Polish-born economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and the Estonian Ragnar Nurkse, in favor of “balanced growth” across a variety of sectors simultaneously, of a “big push” to break the trap of underdevelopment, a disposition leaning hard to the “experience-distant” end of the conceptual spectrum.
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All of this was supposed to emanate from the members of the council planners housed in the Banco de la República.

It was perhaps predictable that grandiose expectations would crash against inconvenient realities. Some were of the missionaries’ own making. Within the council, the mission’s inflated scale and top-down government planning crossed with personal conflicts. The World Bank urged the council to hire an outside “expert” to assure technical ability and keep
decisions from getting embroiled in partisan fighting. Vice President Robert Garner, with Sandy Stevenson’s imprimatur, had recommended Albert O. Hirschman “as an economist of outstanding ability and integrity”; both Hirschman and the bank agreed that expertise and outsiders had to be kept to a minimum to simplify internal affairs and that one priority should be to train a cadre of experienced and proficient Colombian administrators. Garner told the council chairman, Emilio Toro, that “we feel strongly that there should be only one ‘Economic Advisor’ to the board” and that Hirschman would have “final authority” to make recommendations. Hirschman sketched out detailed guidelines for his role in the new council and presented them to Toro, curbing his role to screen investment alternatives and to evaluate projects for the policy makers. Excited, he felt that an effective council with an effective outsider could strike the right balance of influence and integration; planning should not take place in a cocoon, he explained. But Toro had other plans; he had kept close ties with Currie, who’d returned to Colombia as a consultant, and urged him to join the council as an “adviser” to focus on matters of the wooly problem of administrative reform. Currie happily accepted and wasted no time expanding the meaning of administrative reform.
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Garner foresaw trouble. He knew of Currie’s ambitious penchants and habit of “creating resistance.” He warned that Currie “might, despite the best of intentions of every side, embarrass Hirschman.” Toro, who seems to have taken a disliking to Hirschman’s modest sights, assured Garner that Hirschman was the “top economist” and the “boss.” But he was irrepressible, as was Currie. The clash of personalities reflected a more profound collision of ideas. Currie liked big plans, especially when they made administrative reform the condition for everything else; Hirschman preferred projects, even big ones—but the more specific, the better. Aligned with Liberals, Currie tended to create animosity between the council and the Conservative government; Hirschman eschewed partisanship and wanted to focus on problem solving.
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To make matters worse, a Belgian economist, Jacques Torfs, also joined the council as an advisor. Torfs and Currie did not see eye to eye; Hirschman too would soon have problems with the Belgian. Between
Torfs’ convictions, Currie’s ambitions, and Hirschman’s growing skepticism, there was plenty of disagreement to go around among the tiny team associated with Colombia’s lofty economic plans. Hirschman confided to Richard Demuth in Washington that “this is not only unpleasant (Currie’s operating methods do not help matters), but also seems to confuse the Council members.” To another he quipped that “the whole episode reminds one of Napoleon’s Hundred Days, with the fortunate difference that Currie’s comeback lasted only about half as long.”
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Hirschman, it must be said, was not exactly an obvious choice to advise the president of Colombia on economic policy. Latin America was terra incognita. The closest he got to development was an invitation to attend a conference in 1952 at the University of Chicago organized by Bert Hoselitz, soon-to-be founder of the journal
Economic Development and Cultural Change
, which would be committed to a more interdisciplinary approach to progress. At the time, Hirschman thought of the southern and eastern Europe he’d known before the war and wrote about in
National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade
. Development was synonymous with industrialization.
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The Chicago event was memorable for a more important reason. Alexander Gerschenkron, Hirschman’s colleague at the Fed and office mate in Berkeley, unveiled a pioneering work in economic thought, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.” Shura argued that progress was not of a piece; societies did not have to follow the same route toward development or to fail. The Marxists’ plodding stages of growth were wrongheaded; so too were counterpoints like “modernization” theory, with each stage eclipsing its predecessor. Backwardness was not a condition that had to be erased as a prerequisite for advancement. It contained some hidden advantages: it could husband a precocious spirit, could foster ideologies of change, and had institutions (like a powerful state) that could pool resources more effectively, and latecomers could skip earlier phases while advanced societies had to labor continually with updating their industrial plants. Backwardness could be an asset, not a liability. At the time, Gerschenkron’s arguments were utterly new. For Hirschman, they were eye-openers. Historical lateness was not necessarily a reason
to despair or a motivation to grasp for ambitious plans to overturn the status quo. The implications were not yet clear to Hirschman; Colombia brought them to light.
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Other than having read Gerschenkron’s paper, Hirschman
was
an ingénue. He was not aware of Rosenstein-Rodan’s work. Nor was he aware of the stirring controversy about the role that international trade played in national development. Since the creation of the United Nations Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (commonly known as ECLA), and the famous 1949 “manifesto” written by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, called
The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems
, there had been a major clash of views. For increasing numbers of Latin American economists, global trade was skewing the pattern of local growth. None of this came to Hirschman’s attention until many years later. In effect, he began to think about development in Colombia from the ground up—with a style but with no theory.

Colombia thus promised all the hallmarks of a professional, personal, and intellectual adventure—which started as so many precursors did, with language. Hirschman’s Spanish was not very good; he had only ever spoken it extensively during his months in Catalonia in 1936. But this soon passed. Before long, Albert found himself at play with Spanish word games, though he never managed to rid his Spanish, or indeed any other language save French, of a distinct German accent. He was not the only one to master Spanish. The whole family did and with the same spirit of adventure. The Chevy Chase house was emptied, and remnants were dispatched to storage. Armed with a few suitcases, they boarded their flight to Bogotá. When the plane ran into difficulties, they were forced to spend a night in a hotel in Miami. While Albert was digging around in the suitcases to find the girls’ pajamas, out came fistfuls of old dresses, pink gauze strips, and forgotten evening gowns from Sarah’s mother’s wardrobe. As the evening wear came flowing out of the suitcases, Sarah confessed that she had secretly packed away her mother’s old gowns so the girls could play their dress-up games. So much for traveling light. The next day, as the plane descended on the Colombian capital, the Hirschmans pressed their faces to the windows to admire the emerald green fields of the valley
below and the hem of Andean mountains that surrounded it. At the airport, a delegation of officials was there to greet them. After much handshaking and presentations, someone from the Central Bank piled the Hirschmans into a car. With the girls squealing in the back seat, everyone marveled as the driver wheeled effortlessly around potholes and donkeys to get the family to their new home.
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The latitude of his tasks enabled him to tailor a work method to fit his inclinations. A trademark of his later research style, conversing with as many people about as many topics as possible to spot possibilities drawn from everyday practices of problem solving, took shape in Colombian fields and factories. Getting to know the country meant getting near its people: lots of travel to talk to farmers, local bankers, industrialists, and artisans who labored to improve their lot in small, ordinary, and to the lofty-minded social scientist, often imperceptible ways. Rather than concern himself with the state issues and courtly intrigue, Hirschman preferred the micro-foundations of economic development—and became especially intrigued by the role, neglected in the Currie Report, of the private sector. He focused on evaluating firms, industries, and sectors as prospects for major investments, presenting their cases to the council as it sifted the worthy from the unworthy. Perhaps Hayek’s warnings of the perils of subjecting people to rules and plans designed for a single (even if enlightened) purpose echoed in Hirschman’s ears; either way, his choice was to accent individual activities for evaluation and attention.

This kind of sleuthing posed its share of challenges. Travel was hard. The roads were treacherous. Railroads were few. The airplane was new, expensive, and only carried passengers to major destinations. Beside, it was also not without its hazards, because the Andean mountainsides were famously lethal obstacles for even skilled pilots. Hirschman’s preferred mode of transportation was his car. He loved his car, a gray Chevrolet, which he had delivered to the steamy Pacific port of Buenaventura. When the vehicle arrived, Sarah and Albert flew to Cali and then took the train to the port to pick it up. After some wrangling at customs, they liberated the vehicle, hired a driver, and prepared their overland return to the capital. That night, the hotel’s orchestra blared into streets while Albert
and Sarah sat on rocking chairs drinking highballs and watching the local belles dance the cumbia. The next morning, their driver never appeared. “He must have gotten drunk,” surmised Sarah. So Albert plucked up the courage—though it probably required little—and embarked on their maiden road trip up the piedmont from the Pacific, down through the rich plain of the Cauca Valley, passing another Andean ridge to wind through the coffee groves around Manizales, and over more ridges back to Bogotá’s valley. This prolonged, winding rollercoaster ride over nosebleed-high gradients was the beginning of a romance with Colombia and Latin America. While the jungle roads and mountain passes, not to mention the fear of bandits, hung over Sarah, Albert’s confidence in their Chevy and his own driving prowess would not be dimmed. Sarah found herself captivated by the orchids hanging from cliffs over the roads. Along the way they picked up hitchhikers, an Indian shepherd, and several policemen escorting two prisoners. If there were any concerns for safety, they were waved off in order to meet as many ordinary Colombians as possible. By the time they got home from their adventures, the car and its driver had been broken in. That night, however, Albert had nightmares of falling over every precipice he had managed to avoid.
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