James H. Street, “The Technological Frontier in Latin America: Creativity and Productivity,” Journal of Economic Issues 10, no. 3 (Sep. 1976), 538-558.
“Yet, the development of technological attitudes and skills begins from infancy in play activities; this fact is now well understood in industrial societies, but is rarely acted upon in societies with a different cultural formation. There is perhaps no greater cultural difference between children who grow up in Latin America and those in the United States than in the degree to which the latter begin in infancy to play with ‘educational’ toys — building blocks, puzzles, and simple tools — and proceed through adolescence to the tinker Toy, the Erector set, the chemistry set, the home-made radio, and often the home microscope and astronomical telescope. The typical North American childhood is littered with artifacts to excite the curiosity, to be manipulated and understood, and to be used with some end in view. This environment is, of course, made possible by the pre-existence of an industrial culture and by the wide diffusion of higher incomes. In Latin America these circumstances do not prevail . . ..”
Notes
- 539-40 – “Latin America is one of the world’s last great frontiers. Frontier is used here in the sense in which C. E. Ayres incorporated it in his theory of economic progress. ‘A frontier,’ he says, ‘is a penetration phenomenon.’ It is a region that offers the space for expansion of population in movement, for a rupture with old institutions, and for the application of techniques brought from other regions to achieve an accelerated rate of development.”
- 542 – “All students of Ayres are aware of the importance he attached to a third aspect of the frontier: it permits a continuity of technological transfers, while at the same time fostering a detachment from previous institutional controls. Latin America, through its overseas connections, has long had contact with European and, more recently, North American influences, and it has become a substantial borrower of foreign technology.”
- 543 – “The horizontal land frontier in Latin America must ultimately come to a close, but beyond that, as Frederick Jackson Turner foresaw in the United States toward the end of the last century, there extends the vertical frontier of internal development. The vertical frontier is, of necessity, largely technological.”
- “Only one-third of the total increase in farm output in the period 1948-1964 could be attributed to higher yields and hence to the employment of more intensive cultivation and new techniques for increasing yields per hectare; two-thirds of the increase in output stemmed from bringing new land under cultivation. (In the case of cereals, higher yields contributed only one-fourth of the increase.)”
- 544 – “The improvements in Mexican wheat yields are even more impressive. The level of Mexican wheat yields in 1935-1939 was below those of the United States and Argentina, but by 1960-1962, average yields exceeded those of both countries. Mexico actually trebled its wheat yields between 1948-1952 and 1964-1965.”
- 545 – “IN the recent period, however, Sunkel believes that international capitalism has become much more highly organized, and governments work hand-in-glove with multinational corporations to dominate weaker economies. Research and development are centralized in the home country, and foreign users are obliged to buy complete packages of entrepreneurship, management, skills, design, technology, financing, and marketing organization at oligopoly or monopoly prices. Even domestic brainpower, government credit agencies, import substitution policies, and other preferential arrangements are coopted for the benefit of foreign firms. The result is increasing dependency and a widening of the technological gap.”
- 546 – “David Felix has offered another explanation for the widening technological dualism that persists between Latin America and the industrial countries. ‘Underdevelopment,’ he says, ‘is essentially a condition of enduring incapacity to modify and dissminate technology on a broad scale.’ This incapacity he attributes to the circumstance that the main world sources of innovation have undergone a significant qualitative shift from Period I, running from the 1860s to the 1920s, to Period II, from the 1920s to the present. During the earlier period, it was possible for major innovations to be introduced by lone inventors engaged in ‘empiricist tinkering and learning by doing.’ (Thomas Alva Edison typified such an inventor.) in the latter period, inventive research has become more formalized and systematic. It requires a high degree of theoretical training in pure science and the careful design of experiments to ensure the probability of precise, planned results. Characteristically, this process requires team organization and is highly responsive to calculated investment, which may be carried out by private or public agencies.”
- THIS IS HYPER-IMPORTANT — SHIFTS IN THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOW CHANGING CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH SCIENCE CAN BE CONDUCTED — HEIGHTENING ITS EXCLUSIVITY, INCENTIVIZING COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEME AND FINANCING PREREQUISITES — FACILITATING THE EURAMERICAN MONOPOLIZATION OF THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE — A COROLLARY TO THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM WERE FIRST POSSIBLE — EURAMERICAN MONOPOLIZATION OF THE PRODUCTION OF INDUSTRIAL GOODS
- “‘Latin American countries,’ according to Felix, ‘though eager borrowers of imported technologies, have been institutionally out of phase in both periods.’ In an illuminating historical review of the earlier period, he describes the complex economic dualism of the village economy and the overseas trade that impeded the progressive growth of local artisanship and agricultural skill.”
- “As a result, Latin America lost the opportunity to become an effective participant in the earlier — and easier — phase of innovational development and was seriously handicapped in entering the more recent phase.”
- “Both local firms and foreign subsidiaries find it easier and more profitable to draw on the international pool of product innovation than to try to enter the expensive game of domestic research and development. He sees no immediate solution for the trend toward increasing technological dualism and economic dependency, although in another essay he suggests that a concentration on biological research might be one area in which Latin America could still reap important gains in agricultural, forestry, and pest control.”
- “Material technology, it must be remembered, is not a single package, but a multitude of discrete elements, a storehouse from which it is possible to select useful parts and to reassemble them into a set of techniques adapted to earlier stages of development and to local circumstances.”
- This seems to misunderstand how agricultural technology was actually introduced to Mexico, and also maybe reflects how it was hoped that diffusion could be reformed after Plan Puebla
- 548 – “There is an element of Yanke ethnocentric superiority in assuming that the techniques of innovation and adaptation cannot be learned by other peoples, especially when their survival depends upon it.”
- There is also an element of Yankee ethnocentric superiority in assuming that Yankee techniques are the best way to perpetuate the survival of those peoples
- “Kuznets, who has also emphasized the transfer of useful knowledge in fostering economic growth, has suggested that, in the case of the less developed countries, ‘the later the entry the higher the initial rates of growth should be, reflecting the existence of a greater stock of technological and social innovation to choose from and the pressure of greater backwardness.’”
- 549 – “Yet, the development of technological attitudes and skills begins from infancy in play activities; this fact is now well understood in industrial societies, but is rarely acted upon in societies with a different cultural formation. There is perhaps no greater cultural difference between children who grow up in Latin America and those in the United States than in the degree to which the latter begin in infancy to play with ‘educational’ toys — building blocks, puzzles, and simple tools — and proceed through adolescence to the tinker Toy, the Erector set, the chemistry set, the home-made radio, and often the home microscope and astronomical telescope. The typical North American childhood is littered with artifacts to excite the curiosity, to be manipulated and understood, and to be used with some end in view. This environment is, of course, made possible by the pre-existence of an industrial culture and by the wide diffusion of higher incomes. In Latin America these circumstances do not prevail . . ..”
