Bauer championed private foreign investment and bourgeois virtues against development orthodoxy

Evidence

Bauer’s policy for progress suggested funding policies that were diametrically opposed to the recommendations of the alleged new orthodoxy: minimize state ownership and planning, and promote private (foreign) investment instead of suppressing it. He called for professions of faith in the world economy. Strong signs of rebounding world trade and the West’s significant investment in the former colonies augured well for progress. Even more important than trade and investment was what “the people do for themselves”: freed from restrictions, Bauer trusted that “middle-class or ‘bourgeois’ virtues” would prevail. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1321

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how early neoliberal intellectuals positioned themselves against Keynesian development economics. — connects to: Bauer held that foreign aid cannot promote growth and persists mainly from Western guilt — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1769; Bauer claimed Western contact, not aid, drove Third World material progress — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1770; Bauer argued industrialization did not require government intervention or raw materials — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1318 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Peter Bauer reframed development economics to prioritize markets over security concerns #expands (0.92) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1334
• The market’s decentralized nature makes economic neocolonialism theoretically impossible for Bauer #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 402
• Bauer mounted a critical attack on Myrdal’s development works #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1364