Anurag > Recent Status Updates

There is the individual dimension and then there is the big picture. A lie in the individual dimension does not necessarily count as a lie in the bigger picture. It can transcend its origins. It's like makeup. Makeup may be a lie, but not if everyone wears it. If everyone wears makeup, makeup becomes the way things are, and what is the truth but the way things are?

Aid is not longer charity.

IMF has been competing with World Bank in aid.

Aid is only as good as the government that receives it.

The developments in USSR ascertained the need to maintain friendship in Asia.

Author also thinks aid as the entry into new era of freindhship - to counter the decolonization process that had started in the erstwhile colonies.

The root of foreign aid lie in the initiatives launched to sustain the damage (deficit-related) inflicted by the depression to colonies.

Fieldhouse considers the depression years as the real economic blow to colonies.

The direct investment in colonies was there as well - however the growth in MNCs was far more significant after 1945 (don't forget that development imperative was used as a political argument by native leaders in Asia and Africa).

There was significant investment in the railway/utility companies in the colonies by West in late Victorian times.

Much like Chirstianity in the last century, the need for soci-economic progress in the West was deemed necessary through new media.

With exception of radical Marxists, most believed that the capitalist framework was necessary for the Third World to catch up.

DK Fieldhouse does believe that India and colonies benefited from free trade until 1932.

Ghana's cocoa marketing board - had to be controlled because it might have become too powerful.

Cocoa trade had grown 50 times in the gold coast (something that didn't occur in New Zealand).

Slaving didn't act as a satisfactory staple (staple theory identifies mass-exports of a commodity-staple which can grow the domestic market).

Slaving didn't act as a satisfactory staple (a staple theory identifies mass-exports of a commodity-staple which can grow the domestic market).

The duality of capital's role in colonies and the reason why Gold coast could not develop the way Australia did is largely due to socio-political hurdles to economic progress.

The duality of capital's role in colonies and the reason why Gold coast could not develop the way Australia did is largely due to socio-political hurdles to economic progress.

Nationalist narrative has eclipsed the role that a dependency could have played. Berman-Londsdale and Bill Warren highlight how old hierarchies weren't disrupted and the transition to industrialized and dependent society didn't need force.

For New Zealand, independence (economic) arguments never gathered political momentum and it could slowly combine commodity exports with improvements in manufacturing.

In 1965, 95% of auto-manufacture was owned by foreign companies.

Kundera jumps between topics occasionally describing what music Goethe would have liked if as an immortal, he would've lived through the war.

A somewhat philosophical observations about love - Bettina finds that love that is planted in people's hearts by angelic gardener needs no object, no response. Later, France appears to have forms not feelings but it's Russia where rationality has been skipped and the Cartesian thought progressed, where the the true place for feelings is.