Friedrich List
Article
Friedrich List is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 21, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “especially Friedrich List in Germany”; “Economic planners like Friedrich List in Germany”; “Korean bureaucrats were reading… Friedrich List”. It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, Asia, Britain.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 21, 2021
- Last seen: June 28, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Alexander Hamilton (2 shared issues)
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- Asia (2 shared issues)
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- Britain (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Deng Xiaoping (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Japan (2 shared issues)
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- South Korea (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 1820s France (1 shared issues)
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- 2000s Bangladesh (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
By 1800, we're already starting to see the developed/undeveloped country gap we know today. The 1800s version of the gap was: Britain was developed, everyone else was undeveloped. Various Western countries noticed this and invented what Allen calls the Standard Development Model. This was the first time anyone had ever tried to do development economics or answer the question "How do countries industrialize and how can we do it faster?" - Britain had industrialized kind of by accident and never considered the question. But other intellectuals in other Western countries started considering the question around this time, especially Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton in the US. They and others independently converged on a four-pronged plan:
And every big developed country that passed through a manufacturing phase used tariffs (except Britain, which industrialized first and didn't need to defend itself against anybody). Economic planners like Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton in the United States realized early on that British competition would stifle the development of native industry without government protection. Once their industries were as good as Britain's, they removed their tariffs, which was the right move - but they never would have been able to reach that level without protectionism.
Korean bureaucrats were reading not the rising American stars of neo-liberal economics, or even Adam Smith, but instead [German development expert and tariff proponent] Friedrich List. The Korea and Taiwan scholar Robert Wade observed when he was teaching in Korea in the late 1970s that ‘whole shelves’ of List’s books could be found in the university bookshops of Seoul. When he moved to the Massachussetts Insitute of Technology, Wade found that a solitary copy of List’s main work had last been taken out of the library in 1966. Such are the different economics appropriate to different stages of development. In Korea, List’s ideas for a national system of development were being adapted to a country with a population far smaller than Germany’s or Japan’s, and with a mid-1970s GDP per capita on par with Guatemala. The ideas were implemented in the teeth of the worst international trading conditions for a generation featuring two unprecedented energy crises. It did not matter. Park motored on regardless. Each time the US, the World Bank and the IMF urged him to back away from his state-led industrial policy he agreed - and then did precisely nothing (or occasionally a very little ). Park was a leader of conviction, and his convictions were based in history.