Reading 1 Flashcards
It is possible to identify all societies, in their economic dimensions,
as lying within one of five categories:- what are the categories
the traditional society, the
preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and
the age of high mass-consumption.
traditional society.
A traditional society is one whose
structure is developed within limited production functions, based
on pre-Newtonian science and technology, and on pre-Newtonian
attitudes towards the physical world. Newton is here used as
a symbol for that watershed in history when men came widely to
believe that the external world was subject to a few knowable laws,
and was systematically capable of productive manipulation.
The conception of the traditional society is, however, in no sense
static; and it would not exclude increases in output. Acreage could
be expanded; some ad hoc technical innovations, often highly pro-
ductive innovations, could be introduced in trade, industry and
agriculture; productivity could rise with, for example, the improve-
ment of irrigation works or the discovery and diffusion of a new
crop.
what is the central fact about the traditional society
But the central fact about the traditional society was that
a ceiling existed on the level of attainable output per head. This
ceiling resulted from the fact that the potentialities which flow from
modern science and technology were either not available or not
regularly and systematically applied.
what are some more characteristics of traditional societies
agriculture, from which a hierarchical societal structure arises, family and clan connections, small but possiblity of upward mobility
The second stage of growth embraces societies in the process of
transition; that is, the period when the preconditions for take-off
are developed;
why does the second stage of growth embrace societies in the process of transition
for it takes time to transform a traditional society
in the ways necessary for it to exploit the fruits of modern science,
to fend off diminishing returns, and thus to enjoy the blessings and
choices opened up by the march of compound interest.
We come now to the great watershed in the life of modern societies:
the third stage in this sequence, the… what and define it
take-off. The take-off is the
interval when the old blocks and resistances to steady growth are
finally overcome. The forces making for economic progress, which
yielded limited bursts and enclaves of modern activity, expand and
come to dominate the society. Growth becomes its normal condi-
tion. Compound interest becomes built, as it were, into its habits
and institutional structure.
New techniques spread in agriculture as well as industry, as
agriculture is
commercialized, and increasing numbers of farmers
are prepared to accept the new methods and the deep changes they
bring to ways of life.
As societies achieved maturity in the twentieth century two things
happened:
real income per head rose to a point where a large number
of persons gained a command over consumption which transcended
basic food, shelter, and clothing; and the structure of the working
force changed in ways which increased not only the proportion of
urban to total population, but also the proportion of the population
working in offices or in skilled factory jobs—aware of and anxious
to acquire the consumption fruits of a mature economy.
Historically, however, the decisive element has
been the cheap mass automobile with its quite revolutionary effects—
social as well as economic—on the life and expectations of society.
For the United States, the turning point was, perhaps,
Henry
Ford’s moving assembly line of 1913-14; but it was in the 1920’s,
and again in the post-war decade, 1946-56, that this stage of growth
was pressed to, virtually, its logical conclusion.
Beyond, it is impossible to predict, except perhaps to observe that
Americans, at least, have behaved in the past decade as if
diminishing
relative marginal utility sets in, after a point, for durable consumers’
goods; and they have chosen, at the margin, larger families—
behaviour in the pattern of Buddenbrooks dynamics.* Americans
have behaved as if, having been born into a system that provided
economic security and high mass-consumption, they placed a lower valuation on acquiring additional increments of real income in the
conventional form as opposed to the advantages and values of an
enlarged family.
Here then, in an impressionistic rather than an analytic way, are
the stages-of-growth which can be distinguished once a traditional
society begins its modernization:
the transitional period when the
preconditions for take-off are created generally in response to the
intrusion of a foreign power, converging with certain domestic
forces making for modernization; the take-off itself; the sweep into
maturity generally taking up the life of about two further generations;
and then, finally, if the rise of income has matched the spread of
technological virtuosity (which, as we shall see, it need not imme- diately do) the diversion of the fully mature economy to the provision
of durable consumers’ goods and services (as well as the welfare
state) for its increasingly urban—and then suburban—population.
what lies beyond the stages of growth
Beyond lies the question of whether or not secular spiritual stagna-
tion will arise, and, if it does, how man might fend it off: a matter
considered in chapter 6.
what do these stages have
they have an inner logic and continuity. They have an analytic bone-structure, rooted in a dynamic
theory of production.
