> Dennis, I'm sort of confused about what you mean by developmental
> states. When you talk about "Europe," it often seems like you're mainly
> talking about the "core" countries in the EU (Germany and France mainly).
It's what the social democrats, back when they were the party of labor and not Euroliberalism, used to call the Sozialstaat or "social state. Central Europe, Benelux, Scandinavia, Finland and Norway have the most developed networks: huge state sectors intermediate about half the economy and invest in education and science, universal healthcare and pensions keep the workforce healthy and productive, strong social protections and strong unions keep wages high, lots of state-owned banks and credit unions discipline finance, etc.
> What did they have to develop away from (except maybe from the
> wreckage of WWII, esp. in Germany's case)?
All these regions were poor as dirt in 1950, with big agrarian populations, limited technology, and per capita incomes of anywhere between a ninth to a third of US levels. Back then, West Germany's biggest industry was digging coal out of the ground. If they had followed Friedmanite monetarism back then, they would've stayed that way.
> industrialization mostly in the 30s and urbanization in the 50s and 60s
> and was the core of a huge, high-tech (by the standards of the
> day) industrial superpower relatively recently.
But Russia never developed management or trading skills: it was based on resource-intensive extraction, autarkic markets, and wasted its vast scientific potential on military production. Like its BRIC counterparts, it had developmental institutions, but not a full-fledged developmental state.
Until now.
-- DRR