Why Visiting Economists Fail: The Turning Point in Ghana 1957–8

‘Many have sought to interpret the world; the point is, to change it.’ In the field of development policy, Lewis was one of the first people to pick up on Marx’s dictum by providing advice to policy-makers wishing to intervene in or speed up the development process. We have already observed some examples of this policy advice and its results in previous chapters, in particular Lewis’s (1942b) report ‘Some Aspects of the Flow of Capital into the British Colonies’, which was his starting-point as a practitioner; his intellectual leadership of the 1951 UN mission that resulted in Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries (United Nations, 1951), which for the first time gave him a global reputation as a development economist; and his institution-building in Moss Side, Manchester in 1953, which sought to overcome racial discrimination against the Afro-Caribbean population of Manchester. These were all short-term assignments lasting six months or less; and yet, as we have seen, they are a key part of Lewis’s creative contribution to development.