Have you ever sought a single background reference to which you could send relatively ethnocentric students to obtain a broad, current, readable and convincing description of the major issues in contemporary relations between the more-developed and the less-developed “worlds”? Have you ever needed to recommend to an inquisitive friend, or to a spouse, a relatively jargon-free discussion of the human and technical policy problems of contemporary development? Have you ever been interested in seeking brief, compatible descriptions of current development efforts in nations as diverse as Algeria, South Korea, Mexico, Cuba, and China?
Paul Alpert’s popularly-oriented book offers all this and more. For he concludes with an optimistic case for “A World Strategy for Economic Development” which transcends ideology and the apparent differences in self-interest which might well generate confrontation and which outlines the possibility (permeating the book) of a world-wide concurrence of interests to be achieved through partnership.
Scholars in most of the social sciences will find nits to pick in Alpert’s generalizations; polemicists will bemoan the lack of polemic in Alpert’s discussions of labor exploitation and international domination and dependence. But most will agree that the volume offers, on the whole, a well-reasoned, well-written analysis of international development conditions in the early 1970s. For that, as well as for its cautiously advocated optimism, it must be recommended.
