On 2012-03-17, at 12:04 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Marv: "Briefly, and in plain English, in what way does "path
> dependence" theory, which I find very abstruse and jargon-ridden like
> much contemporary economic and sociological theory, contribute to your
> understanding?"
>
> […]
>
> Similar arguments were used to explain national economic development
> to counter "designer capitalism" approach popular in the 1990s. The
> argument was that wholesale transfer of neoliberal markets to former
> socialist economies would not work because of "path dependence" on
> institutional solutions developed under socialism, and an approach
> that favors slow transformation of the existing institutions instead
> of 'shock therapy" is more likely to be effective. Needless to say
> that the 20 years of recent history proved the path dependence
> approach right and the shock therapy squarely wrong. Another
> macro-institutional application of this theory is the development of
> social welfare systems that depend on already existing solutions (e.g.
> the "pillarized" by religious affiliation educational and social
> welfare services in the Netherlands that in the 20th century were used
> to deliver government social welfare services.)
I agree about the shock therapy, don't know enough about the Dutch example. "Path dependence" strikes me as a fashionable academic restatement of conservative (and social democratic) theory: that revolutionary change which abruptly uproots deeply entrenched cultural and social arrangements is apt to be destructive, and that progress is necessarily slow and incremental. That's certainly true in some circumstances - the "dead hand of the past" always has to be taken into account - but it's not a universal law, which is what seems to be implied. The nature and tempo of change appropriate to a specific set of circumstances only becomes apparent in retrospect, when it becomes clear whether it was precisely correct or too catastrophically radical ("adventurist") or catastrophically timid ("opportunist").