Lewis and the New World Economists
This is the second of a lecture delivered by Professor Norman Girvan on February 20 at the UWI St Augustine campus to launch the year of Sir Arthur Lewis in commencement of the Caribbean’s first Nobel Laurette.
Professor Girvan’s presentation is reprinted from the Trinidad and Tobago Review of March 3, 2008. The third part will appear in our next issue.
By Norman Girvan
This brings me to the controversies surrounding the differences between Lewis and the New World Economists; a group in which, of course, I count myself. The differences were mainly over the role of foreign capital in industrialisation strategies; which Lewis advocated and the New World economists critiqued; and over what is the appropriate model for understanding West Indian economies; with Lewis using his dual economy model and the New World economists opposing this with the plantation economy model.
However, the New World critiques were often advanced as polemic in which the Lewis model of Industrialisation—which ascribed a leading role to foreign investors—was ridiculed as ‘Industrialisa-tion by Invitation.’
This term was invented by Lloyd Best, and it became associated, in the late 1960s, with unemployment, foreign control, over the economy, dependency, and lack of transformation—all the main problems of the time. This diagnosis was embraced by the new generation of young radicals as part of a political project. And there is no doubt that the attacks on Lewis could become personal. To many of my generation Arthur Lewis, with his English accent and bearing similar to that of an English academic, was the epitome of the black Englishman. This perception that was also fuelled by his critique of the American Black Power movement—Lewis argued that it should focus on acquiring mainstream educational skills rather than on Black cultural studies—and his view that the steel band was not an appropriate representation of West Indian national culture. As recently as 2002 instance we find Lloyd Best making the following statement.
That generation did not understand the problem. They had a lot of very good ideas which were expressed in the Lewis proposal for economic development, but Lewis was an Englishman. When I say that, people think I am trying to denounce him or pull him down. Quite the opposite. He was epistemologically an Englishman; he was brought up by Ricardian and Smithian theories and he was Stanley Jevons professor in the University of Man-chester. He had to be an Englishman. And his great acheivement was that he was an English economist who understood what economic transformation had been in England, and he developed a model that was suitable to most countries in the world. The country it was not suitable for was the West Indies, the Caribbean (Best 2003: 426).
