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Peter Thomas Bauer, 1915-2002
Budapest-born Pieter Tamás (later Peter Thomas) Bauer moved from Hungary to England in 1934, to study at Caius College, Cambridge. After a stint working the private sector merchant bank with activities in Asia, Bauer took up an appointment at the L.S.E, carving out a career a leading development economist with quite radical laissez-faire instincts. P.T. Bauer taught at the L.S.E. from 1960 to 1983, whereupon he was made a life peer.
One of the grandees of economic development theory, P.T. Bauer nonetheless seemed immune from the influence of his peers - particularly on the role of government intervention in development. Bauer's thesis was unique at the time: he did not dispute the structuralist thesis that Third World countries were not merely 20th Century versions of 19th Century Europe. Bauer agreed that they had distinct structural features of their own which were brought about by their coexistence with industrialized world, but he identified these features not in trade-induced dependency, but rather in the inheritance of European-style large, bureaucratic, dirigiste states. Structural problems in development were, in Bauer's view, the result of state interference.
The only sense in which trade is malign, Bauer argued, was in that its gains were diverted to state coffers and not to the private sector. Private entrepreneurs, he felt, were the engines of development and are very capable, in the Third World as much as the First, to engender development. It was states - Neo-Colonial and otherwise - that were hampering them and thus development as a whole. Western aid, Bauer argues, merely enables dirigiste governments to continue their destructive policies for years on end.
Unfortunately, Bauer's polemical tone -- often disparaging of the achievements of Third World countries and exalting Western civilization and its benign effects on the Third World -- have not given him much of an audience in the countries where his propositions might matter most.
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