Volume 31, Number 8 · May 10, 1984
Why TVA Failed
By Jane Jacobs
The conventional prescription for poor and backward nations or regions is 'industrial development.' This seems a logical remedy for their plight since any economy that lacks industry must either go without manufactured goods or else, to an absurd degree, import almost everything its people require, paying with one or a few kinds of cash crops or resource exports. Such colonial-type economies, by definition, are not economically well rounded, cannot produce amply and diversely for their own people and producers as well as for others the way rich and more advanced economies do. They lack much range of opportunity, have no practical foundation for economic self-development, and are disastrously at the mercy of distant and often capricious markets for the few things they do produce. To wriggle out of their fix, it is true that they need industry.
Feature, 7350 words
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