Some ‘Scandals’ of International Economics

Abstract

Accidents of personal academic history barred me — or so I believed —from international economics early on. Not having studied the subject as an undergraduate, I did not do well in the redoubtable Jacob Viner’s graduate sequence at Chicago in the mid-1900s. What brought me back to the field were two policy issues of the immediate post-war period a dozen years later — the allegedly-permanent ‘dollar shortage’ and the alleged impossibility of Japanese return to balanced international payments at or above the country’s pre-war standard of living. These were joined in the early 1950s by another ‘Japanese’ issue — the questionable relevance of Meiji Era development experience to the problems of Asian and Latin American LDCs a century later. To make a long story short, I began teaching international economics in the early 1960s, and have continued to do so at intervals ever since.¹ But I remain more nearly self-taught in theoretical aspects than are most international economists of my acquaintance, and therefore limit my teaching to the undergraduate level. I beg your kind indulgence insofar as my criticism of the conventional wisdom of international economics betrays mainly my own ignorance of the relevant literature.

When all year long a man remains

Teaching his class, to ease monotony, He exercises of his brains, That is, assuming that he’s got any.

Though never nurtured in the lap

Of luxury, yet I admonish you,

I am an intellectual chap

And harbour thoughts that would astonish you.

W. S. Gilbert, Iolanthe (revised edition)