According to the foreword these notes were intended originally only to provide background material on comparative Latin American industrialization for the Institute project on the politics of modernization. The guilt for their publication, therefore, falls squarely on the shoulders of the Institute directors, Miss Leiserson’s sin being merely that she assented.
The notes are for the non-specialist, who may glean some bibliographical references but will certainly be confused by the approach. The author has clipped and pasted from a disparate array of sources a succession of generalizations, some vague and platitudinous, some contradictory, some provocative but elliptical, as though these added up to a coherent synthesis of the patterns and problems of industrialization in the three countries from the nineteenth century to the present. Depending on who is being quoted, protection was inadequate and excessive, inflation stimulating and distorting, small-scale firms a mark of progress and obstacles to progress, etc.
Merely identifying and resolving the more obvious conflicts in interpretation would have made the notes a useful venture. Instead the spurious synthesizing culminates with references to recent pronunciamentos by СТАР, ECLA, and other official agencies, the gist of which is that if Latin American countries can create “a suitable environment for economic development” (p. 99) by increasing agricultural production, reducing income inequality, developing their interior provinces, forming a regional market, raising industrial efficiency, and promoting industrial exports, they ought to be able to develop. Calvin Coolidge once announced with similar logic that when “young men are unable to find work, unemployment results.”
