Kicking Away the Ladder. Development Strategy in Historical Perspective

It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations.

Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throwaway these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth. [my italics][9]

As for the USA, List points out that the country had previously been misjudged by the great economic theorists Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say as being ‘like Poland’, namely, destined to rely on agriculture.[10] Indeed, Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations sternly warned the Americans against any attempt at infant industry promotion:

Were the Americans, either by combination or by any other sort of violence, to stop the importation of European manufactures, and, by thus giving a monopoly to such of their own countrymen as could manufacture the like goods, divert any considerable part of their capital into this employment, they would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness.[11]

Two generations later, when List was writing his book, many Europeans still shared Smith’s view. Fortunately for them, List argues, the Americans firmly rejected Smith’s analysis in favour of ‘common sense’ and ‘the instinct of what was necessary for the nation’, proceeding to protect their infant industries with great success after 1816.[12]

List’s observation was more than vindicated subsequently, as the USA remained the most ardent practitioner – and the intellectual home - of protectionism for a century after he wrote those passages but also became the world’s industrial leader by the end of that period (see section 2.2.2 of Chapter 2). List was also proven right by subsequent historical events with regard to his comment on ‘kicking away the ladder’. When its industrial supremacy became absolutely clear after the Second World War, the USA was no different from nineteenth-century Britain in promoting free trade, despite the fact that it acquired such supremacy through the nationalistic use of heavy protectionism.

These are important historical facts that we will establish in greater detail in the next chapter. For the moment, however, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to List’s methodology, that is, his historical approach to economics.

This approach, if applied appropriately, does not limit itself to the collection and cataloguing of historical facts in the hope that some pattern will naturally emerge. Rather, it involves searching for persistent historical patterns, constructing theories to explain them, and applying these theories to contemporary problems, while taking into account changes in technological, institutional and political circumstances.