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enforces strongly common patterns of behavior. If one had to settle on the distinction between nations of greatest descriptive importance in our time it would certainly be the difference between the rich and the poor.
    And this, with some exceptions, has come to be the distinction employed by those who deal professionally with the problems of economic development. Excluding the Communist countries, their discussion has tended to divide the world into the developed and the underdeveloped sector and these terms generally reflect differences in incomes. 1 The underdeveloped countries are assumed to have enough in common so that as “the descriptive literature on such countries suggests . . . we may confidently describe ‘a representative underdeveloped country’”. 2
    To this tendency there are exceptions and the one that comesfirst to mind is that adumbrated by Professor W. W. Rostow in his
The Stages of Economic Growth
3 with its not wholly reticent claim of being an answer to
The Communist Manifesto
. Professor Rostow regards all countries as passing in rather measured fashion from a traditional mold; into preparation for take-off into sustained growth; on to “the great watershed” of modern societies, the take-off; and finally on to maturity and then an age of high mass consumption.
    There are several difficulties with Professor Rostow’s scheme and his critics have not been lacking in either vigor or material. The take-off period he has assigned to various countries—Great Britain 1783-1802, France 1830-1860, Canada 1896-1914, Russia, putting Lenin and Stalin neatly where they belong, 1890-1914 4 —differs only marginally in rate and character of change from that before and after. 5 The notion of a take-off, a comparatively brief period when there is technical change, the building of railways and other social capital and the appearance of a political group devoted to modernization, radically minimizes the obstacles that the poor country encounters. As a consequence, the notion of development has become associated in the popular mind with an ease and certainty, and a rate of possible improvement, which is unfortunately at odds with the reality. 6
    But the most serious fault of Professor Rostow is that, on closer examination, he is seen also to deal with the underdeveloped countries as a class. His countries are at different way stations along the same path; they differ from each other only as a child from an adolescent and an adolescent from someone in early maturity. The broad prescription for growth is the same for all; differentiation is required only in accordance with the stage of the country as with the age of the individual. Should it be that the path is different for different countries, the common prescription will obviously be inadequate or in error for some. This is the case.It must be said in defense of Professor Rostow, in this respect, that his dereliction is considerably more mild than those who, forswearing even his distinctions, speak of all underdeveloped countries as one. The dangers here require a special word.
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    Once some years ago I visited Bhutan, a lovely pastoral country in the Himalayas with rich forests, clear streams and—unique in Asia—a declining population. It is indubitably underdeveloped. It has no industry, airport, railroad, post office, television, department store, diplomacy, bureaucracy, air pollution, outdoor advertising, or settled capital city. It occurred to me that a fence should be built around it to protect it from development. But I quickly recovered my senses. Economic development is an intrinsically normative subject. To talk about underdevelopment is to consider,
pro tanto
, the steps that will overcome economic backwardness. It follows that, so long as we speak of underdeveloped countries as a class, we will tend to assume a common therapy applicable to the whole class. We will devise programs that are meant to be applicable