Profile Major Works Resources

Walt Whitman Rostow, 1916-2003

Photo of W.W. Rostow

Economic historian and articulator of a linear stages theory of economic development with his 1960 booklet, Stages of Economic Growth.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York, Walt Whitman Rostow obtained his Ph.D. at Yale in 1939 (with a stint as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in between).  Rostow subsequently served as an economics instructor at Columbia until the outbreak of the war.  During WWII, Rostow served as an officer in the OSS (ancestral to the CIA) in Washington.  He returned to academia after the war.  After brief periods at Oxford in 1946 and Cambridge in 1949, Rostow became professor of economic history at MIT in 1950.

Outside of economics, W.W. Rostow became a political adviser to the US presidents John F. Kennedy  and Lyndon B. Johnson.  After serving as Kennedy's campaign strategist in 1960, Rostow became a state department official and later national security adviser during the Vietnam War, and was reputedly instrumental in increasing US military involvement there.  He later taught at the University of Texas at Austin.

Rostow's 1960 linear stages theory of development argued that all developing countries must pass through five distinct stages: (1) "traditional society" (subsistence agriculture, next to no savings or investment), (2) "preconditions for take-off" (agriculture becomes mechanised, surpluses emerge, savings begin to grow to about 5% of GDP), (3) "take-off" (manufacturing grows, political institutions develop, savings rates increase to 10-to-15% of GDP); (4) "drive to maturity" (savings steady at 10-20%, growth spreads to other sectors, technological improvement, increasing diversity), (5) "age of mass consumption" (output driven by consumption, beginning of shift to tertiary sector). Rostow envisaged the length could take forty to sixty years from take-off to maturity. The theory was criticized for its "one-size-fits-all" approach - and in particular, the centrality of savings, which was not always evident at the rates Rostow assumes and for overlooking the importance international trade and competition.

 

  

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Major Works of Walt Whitman Rostow

  • "Investment and the Great Depression", 1938, Econ History Review
  • Essays on the British Economy of the Nineteenth Century, 1948.
  • "The Terms of Trade in Theory and Practice", 1950, Econ History Review
  • "The Historical Anlysis of Terms of Trade", 1951, Econ History Review
  • The Process of Economic Growth, 1952.
  • "Trends in the Allocation of Resources in Secular Growth", 1955, in Dupriez, editor, Economic Progress
  • An American Policy in Asia, with R.W. Hatch, 1955.
  • "The Take-Off into Self-Sustained Growth", 1956, EJ [pdf]
  • A Proposal: Key to an effective foreign policy, with M. Millikan, 1957.
  • "The Stages of Economic Growth", 1959, Econ History Review
  • The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto, 1960.
  • Politics and the Stages of Growth, 1971.
  • How it All Began: Origins of the modern economy, 1975.
  • The World Economy: History and prospect, 1978.
  • Why the Poor Get Richer and the Rich Slow Down: Essays in the Marshallian long period, 1980.
  • "Development: the political economy of the Marshallian long period"  1984, in G.M. Meier and D. Seers, ed, Pioneers in Development [ch.9, full]
  • "Beware of historians bearing false analogies", 1988, Foreign Affairs
  • Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present, 1990.

 
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Resources on  W.W. Rostow

  • W.W. Rostow page at LBJ School, Univ of Texas
  • W.W. Rostow entry at Office of Historian, White House
  • Rostow obituary in NY Times, 2003
  • Rostow obituary in the Guadian
  • Rostow obituary at Economist
  • Rostow entry at American National Biography
  • Rostow page at Spartacus
  • Rostow interview at Wilson Center
  • Rostow interview at GWU
  • "Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth through Escalation to Nuclear Destruction", by A.G. Frank, c.1967 [Pittsburgh pdf]
  • America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and Vietnam War by David Milne, 2008
  • "Review Milne's Rostow" by J.G. Valentine at H-net online
  • "Criticism of Rostow's Stage approach: The concepts of stage, system and type", by Yoichi Itgaki, 2007, Developing Economies. [pdf]
  • Summary of Five Stages of Growth [pdf]
  • Another summary at Lewis Historical [online]
  • Rostow entry at Britannica
  • Wikipedia

 

 
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