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Biographer of Development EconomicsNovember, 2003 by Frederick Rose After 50 years of teaching the sometimes preachy subject of development, Jerry Meier's self-deprecating approach continues to appeal to students.Business studies usually dwell on success, but for over 30 years economist Jerry Meier has taught thousands of Stanford students to focus on failure. Meier—more formally Gerald M. Meier, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics and Policy Analysis, Emeritus—has brought a pioneering passion to economic development and guided generations of students through some of the stormiest debates in economics. Starting in 1957 Meier co-authored what is believed to have been the first economic development text in the United States. Early in his Stanford tenure, he introduced one of the first economic development courses to the MBA world. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics and finance at Columbia University, calls Meier a leading figure in the evolution of development economics. "His publications over an extended period have helped define the field," Stiglitz says, adding "it's a credit to Stanford's business school it has had such a fine development economist on the faculty." "Because of Jerry's efforts, the GSB is perhaps unique among business schools in its longstanding focus on development," says John McMillan, a Business School professor of economics and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. McMillan in the spring of 2003 succeeded Meier in teaching courses in economic development. If Stanford was wise to foster development studies, it was fortunate indeed in having a strong person for the job. Monica Brand, MBA '97, recalls that Meier rowed against the business school mainstream. "In an environment of the late 1990s where the paradigm of the day was excitement about dot-coms and the Internet, Professor Meier succeeded in making economic development interesting through his passion and his intellectual rigor," says Brand, who is senior director of research and development for ACCION International, a not-for-profit institution with development programs worldwide. Brand says Meier's style was part of his strength: "His light-heartedness and a witty sense of self-deprecation was unique in a topic where people tend to be preachy." Meier's courses built on the classic economic analysis of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, and then of more recent theorists to derive an understanding of the forces in underdeveloped economies. Meier's 1957 textbook, co-authored initially with Harvard economist Robert E. Baldwin, later was generally published under Meier's sole authorship with the title Leading Issues in Economic Development. The work was translated into seven languages. This influential text was used to teach several generations of economists. McMillan recalls reading the work as an undergraduate in New Zealand. "It remains far fresher in my memory than any other textbook I read at that time." In the summer of 2003, the evolution of development economics was very much on Meier's mind. Deeply tanned at 80 years old, he lounged in khaki shorts, a tennis shirt, and sneakers, with a baseball cap pointed jauntily skyward. Outside, palm trees baked in the sun of the Stanford campus. Inside, the air-conditioned conversation turned to the professor's latest project, a history of development theories, and Meier tapped a foot-high stack of manuscript pages on his desk labeled Economic Development: Biography of a Subject. After a decade, the manuscript was finished, but the subject certainly isn't. "I call the final chapter 'An Unfinished Biography,'" says Meier. He might as well call the book "Present at the Creation," for Meier was witness to the very beginnings of economic development as a modern discipline. The climate at Oxford University was far different in 1949, when as a Rhodes Scholar, a young Jerry Meier attended a lecture on the economics of poor countries. Hla Myint, later a leading figure in development theory, was the speaker, and his subject was timely. In the late 1940s Europe's colonial empires were crumbling. Political independence was around the corner for some of the poorest economies in the world. Yet how would the postcolonial economies of Africa and Asia stand on their own two feet? What would encourage their growth? Those were huge questions. "It was a subject of enormous promise," Meier says. "It became a passion of my life." The subject spread, but the content was always in flux. There was at first enormous optimism that new insights of modern economics could greatly facilitate the postcolonial world's emergence into a wealthy future. Early development theories focused on the "Big Push," as it was known, which called for huge capital investment in an underdeveloped region—a steel mill, auto plant, or similar sudden industrial intervention. The factory's output could be exported to pay for the cost of the plant. At the same time, the new facility was to foster a network of domestic suppliers around it; these suppliers in turn would boost the nation's economy. Or that was the plan. It was a disaster. Economists went back to the drawing board. Through much of the 1950s, more elaborate theories of "National Policy" called for broad restructuring of underdeveloped economies. Central, state planning was needed, it was argued, not out of doctrinaire demands for socialism but out of urgent need to reverse the plight of the poor. In time, grand restructurings too would come a cropper. Meier spent much of the 1950s teaching and writing first at Williams College, where he introduced development economics to the United States, then at Wesleyan University, where he established a course in underdeveloped economies. "I took it everywhere I could," he would later say. It had been a meteoric career to that point, with work on both sides of the Atlantic and visiting appointments at some of the world's most prestigious institutions. Meier was not yet 40 years old. Then he undertook a year of research at Stanford. There was no academic attachment to the university at the time but by the end of that year, 1962, the Meier family had come to like Stanford and Palo Alto. Their neighbor, the late Ezra Solomon, began wooing Meier to join the Business School. The recruiting worked, although not as easily as its perpetrators might have thought nor on quite the terms that Meier expected. It would be more than a year before the Meier family—Meier; his wife, Gretl; and three boys, soon to be four—permanently moved west. "I came to Stanford because I had young children," Meier has said. But to do so, he had to give up a tenured professorship at Wesleyan. The Stanford Business School's dean, the late Ernest Arbuckle, persuaded the Meiers to take a chance—on a limited term appointment. "I gave up tenure and I came here on a three-year deal," Meier says. "Terrible," he adds with a grimace. At first, Meier didn't teach a course in development economics. Not until a student petitioned Arbuckle for a course did the GSB call on Meier to teach the discipline in which he was a well-known expert. The first year, the course had only a small turnout. By the following year, demand increased substantially, Meier says. Over time, student travels and more attention to international economies spurred demand for the subject.
It was the subject itself that was in trouble. Meier early on was concerned about the weaknesses of centrally planned development schemes. In a prescient 1965 Stanford working paper, Meier cautioned that consultants' use of spiffy economic modeling and linear programming might wow client governments in underdeveloped nations but that "subsequent experience has too often been sobering." Market pricing and allocation were being tossed aside in favor of central planning, and agriculture too often was neglected in favor of industrialization, Meier wrote. It was a classic Meier cautionary step, notes Stiglitz of Columbia. "Jerry is somebody who brought eminent good sense to development economics," Stiglitz says. By the 1970s, the shortcomings of early economic development hardly needed spotlighting. Rampant inflation in Latin America sent economies there spinning. Development schemes to replace imports in underdeveloped countries with domestic goods had fostered inefficient, tariff-protected factories throughout the developing world. Monetarists of the Chicago School crowed that market forces were ignored and that money supply issues had been overlooked in favor of boosting output. By the 1980s, theories had tilted far toward free-market structures. A centrist, Meier again argued that things had swung far past a sensible balance. In his latest work, the biography of economic development, Meier complains that "instead of pursuing the grand theories and general strategies of the first generation of development economists, the second generation was now almost moralistic, dedicated to virtuous policies based on neoclassical (market) economics." But in these Reagan years, institutions ranging from the White House to the Treasury to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were so firmly lined up behind free market advocacy that the remedial regime of private industry, tariff removals, and tight monetary policy became known as the "Washington consensus." "The eighties were very hard," Meier recalls. By 1988, he asked in a Stanford research paper the essential question, "Do Development Economists Matter?" In the paper of the same name, Meier conceded that cherished theoretical assumptions of the discipline had long since passed. "If development economists are now to have more influence," he wrote, "the subject of development economics must move beyond neoclassical economics." The often-naive notion that governments always acted in the public interest had been crushed time and again. Meier admitted that without many simplifying assumptions, development economists' jobs would grow far more complicated. However, "we must open the black box of the state," he wrote. Public bureaucracies must be analyzed, as should interest groups. Sociological insights shouldn't be overlooked, nor should various political factions. "Do Development Economists Matter?" and other Meier papers were on the mark. In the 1990s, the deeply rooted inadequacies of the "Washington consensus" approach were amply demonstrated in Argentina's instability and its subsequent economic plunge in 2002. And, true to Meier's call back in 1988, development economics has moved past its singular concentration on one-size-fits-all free-market fixes toward a more realistic and encompassing multidisciplinary approach. Looking back on it all—the analysis of rising and falling theories, the success and failure of half a century of development, and the passing of those lessons on to generations of students—Jerry Meier shakes his head. "I don't know what value my career has been, if any, but certainly I would say it's the teaching that I most value." |
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Biographer
of Development Economics
