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Robert McNamara passes away
He is best known for his dubious role in the Vietnam War and also, now, through the movie The Fog of War. But McNamara also had a huge influence on the economics profession, most of all through his 13-year presidency at the World Bank. He focused the Bank on poverty reduction, he brought Communist China into the Bank, he introduced the practice of five-year lending plans, he significantly increased the Bank's budget, he grew staff from 1600 to 5700, he favored sector-specific research, he raised money from OPEC, he strongly encouraged "scientific project evaluation," and he started a largely successful program to combat "river blindness"; the latter may have been his life's achievement. The Bank as a large, modern technocracy -- for better or worse -- dates largely from his tenure.
He probably shaped the Bank more than did any other single person. Here is one overview. The Bank, of course, continues to be a major employer of economists and a major influence on the theory and practice of development economics.
Addendum: Kevin Drum offers some interesting thoughts.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 6, 2009 at 09:51 AM in Economics, History | Permalink
Comments
There is a fascinating part in the fog of war. It deals with the technological optimization of death in WW2 and the moral problems that result. It is here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er2xCn3_QcQ
Posted by: davidc at Jul 6, 2009 10:28:34 AM
Good god Tyler, ban the Juicy spammer already. :/
Posted by: david at Jul 6, 2009 11:52:10 AM
He is best known for his dubious role in the Vietnam War and also, now, through the movie The Fog of War. But McNamara also had a huge influence on the economics profession, most of all through his 13-year presidency at the World Bank. He focused the Bank on poverty reduction, he brought Communist China into the Bank, he introduced the practice of five-year lending plans, he significantly increased the Bank's budget, he grew staff from 1600 to 5700...
It sounds like he should be known for his dubious role in the Vietnam War and his dubious role at the World Bank.
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Jul 6, 2009 12:20:33 PM
and his dubious role at the World Bank
Try reading TC's link. He probably saved more lives in his World Bank service than were lost on all sides in Vietnam during his Pentagon tenure. If that's "dubious" to you, fine.
Posted by: Anderson at Jul 6, 2009 12:53:58 PM
No doubt, he was a deeply flawed individual. In many ways, he was a technocrat without moral compass. He was incredibly brilliant but he lacked the moral judgment about how to use this brilliance. He is responsible, in some great part, for the deaths of many people my age in the Vietnam war. Perhaps some of them would have been as brilliant and accomplished as he had they had the chance to live. His life was a tragedy.
Posted by: Mario Rizzo at Jul 6, 2009 1:00:52 PM
He shifted the Bank from small sensible projects to big picture development economics. Which was bad economics, so it didn't work out well.
Posted by: Bill Easterly at Jul 6, 2009 2:13:34 PM
He shifted the Bank from small sensible projects to big picture development economics.
Eh? AP obit: McNamara served as the World Bank president for 12 years. He tripled its loans to developing countries and changed its emphasis from grandiose industrial projects to rural development before retiring in 1981.
See also TC's link to the World Bank bio:
Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed - in Sub-Saharan Africa.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.
The wonderful thing about ideology is that you already know what to think without troubling over the facts.
Posted by: Anderson at Jul 6, 2009 5:11:01 PM
Anderson, you're saying that it was remotely possible that the World Bank's own bio would say, "Although McNamara increased the Bank's funding, in retrospect it's not clear that he helped any poor people with his wasteful programs." ?
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Jul 6, 2009 8:00:34 PM
Another Great Frontiersman, Great Society technocrat bites the dust. At least he wasn't as bad as the worst American ever, Al Hamilton, creator of the American state and the T-Department.
Posted by: AADL at Jul 6, 2009 8:39:27 PM
I guess it's just a myth, however, that McNamara was responsible for the Edsel.
Posted by: bodycount at Jul 7, 2009 2:01:31 AM
"in retrospect it's not clear that he helped any poor people with his wasteful programs"
Read again what the Bank did under his tenure, and then tell me that it's remotely plausible that *no* poor people were helped.
As for "wasteful," what program isn't wasteful? We were wasteful as hell in World War 2, but we won.
Posted by: Anderson at Jul 7, 2009 10:51:06 AM
Well, if the World Bank under McNamara's tenure had won and abolished world poverty I doubt there'd be much kvetching about the cost.
Also since Bill Easterly actually worked for the WB he probably knows more about McNamara's influence than anyone else on this comment thread.
Posted by: Ali Choudhury at Jul 7, 2009 2:26:41 PM
Well, if the World Bank under McNamara's tenure had won and abolished world poverty I doubt there'd be much kvetching about the cost.
Also since Bill Easterly actually worked for the WB he probably knows more about McNamara's influence than anyone else on this comment thread.
Posted by: Ali Choudhury at Jul 7, 2009 2:27:12 PM
Although his architecture of the Vietnam war and handling of the Cuban Missile crisis and lots of other stuff he did was just plain bad, he was willing to admit he was wrong to a great extent and sought to mend his ways as he got older - he began calling for reductions in nuclear armaments and an end to wars to "protect" American interests; perhaps too little too late but at long last it seemed he realized the chicken-hawk ways he and the rest of the right-wing embraced were folly and in the end was not above admitting it, and then tried to use his influence to convince others of the same. More right-wingers should see the light, preferably sooner in life, by looking at how Dr. Strange finally learned from his mistakes.
Posted by: johnman at Jul 7, 2009 3:28:09 PM
The Shock Doctrine
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
By Naomi Klein
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
New York, 2007 Chapter 8 discusses how the Chicago School took hold of the IMF and the World Bank, and how "structural adjustment programs" were used to force the national economies of debtor nations to subscribe to neoliberal prescriptions. The recipe used was simple: manipulate commodity prices to force national economies into crisis, offer IMF loans as the price of economic stability, and force through "structural adjustment" and corporate penetration as the price of the loans. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/16/174353/77/878/398821
Posted by: MM Ryan at Jul 8, 2009 5:13:06 PM
I've never watched the movie the Fog of the War. I think I should really check it out some time.
Posted by: Living Room Furniture at Nov 10, 2009 11:22:58 AM
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Posted by: pool cues at Nov 10, 2009 11:32:39 AM
