[...] the washing machine and other household appliances, which, by vastly reducing the amount of work needed for household chores, allowed women to enter the labour market and virtually abolished professons with domestic service [...]

Even more worryingly, the fascination with the internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the 'digital divide' between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies, charitable foundations and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity grids and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people's lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up internet centres in rural villages. [...]

The free-market policy package, often known as the neo-liberal policy package, emphasizes lower inflation, greater capital mobility and greater job insecurity (euphemistically called greater labour market flexibility), essentially because it is mainly geared towards the interests of the holders of financial assets. Inflation control is emphasized because many financial assets have nominally fixed rates of return, so inflation reduces their real returns. Greater capital mobility is promoted because the main souce of the ability for the holders of financial assets to reap higher returns than the holders of other (physical and human) assets is their ability to move around their assets more quickly (see Thing 22). Greater labour market flexibility is demanded because, from the point of view of financial investors, making hiring and firing of workers easier allows companies to be restructured more quickly, which means that they can be sold and bought more readily with better short-term balance sheets, bringing higher financial returns (see Thing 2).

[...] Britain adopted free trade only in the 1860s, when its industrial dominance was absolute. In the same way in which the US was the most protectionist country in the world during most of its phase of ascendancy (from the 1830s to the 1940s), Britain was one of the world's most protectionist countries during much of its own economic rise (from the 1720s to the 1850s).

Virtually all of today's rich countries used protectionism and subsidies to promote their infant industries. [...]

[...]

[...] For the same reason why we send our children to school rather than making them compete with adults in the labour market, deveoping countries need to protect and nurture their producers before they acquire the capabilities to compete in the world market unassisted. [...]

Then why are the relative prices of manufactured goods falling? It is because manufacturing industries tend to have faster productivity growth than services. As the output of the manufcaturing sector increases faster than the output of the service sector, the prices of the manufactured goods relative to those of services fall. In manufacturing, where mechanization and the use of chemical processes are much easier, it is easier to raise productivity than in services. In contrast, by their very nature, many service activities are inherently impervious to productivity increase without diluting the quality of the product.

[...] We don't see any Swiss manufactured products around because the country is small (around 7 million people), which makes the total amount of Swiss manufactured goods rather small, and because its producers specialize in producer goods, such as machinery and industrial chemicals, rather than consumer goods that are more visible. But in per capita terms, Switzerland has the highest industrial output in the world (it could come second after Japan, depending on the year and the data you look at). [...]

Since the late 1970s (starting with Senegal in 1979), Sub-Saharan African countries were forced to adopt free-market, free-trade policies through the conditions imposed by the so-called Structural Adjustment (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF (and the rich countries that ultimate control them). [...] By suddenly exposing immature producers to international competition, these policies led to the collapse of what little industrial sectors these countries had managed to build up during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, having been forced back into relying on exports of primary commodities, such as cocoa, coffee and copper, African countries have continued to suffer from the wild price fluctuations and stagnant production technologies that characterize most such commodities. The result was often a collapse of prices in those commodities due to a large increase in their supplies, which sometimes meant that these countries were exporting more in quantity but earning less in revenue. The pressure on governments to balance their budgets led to cuts in expenditures whose impacts are slow to show, such as infrastructure. Over time, however, the deteriorating quality of infrastructure disadvantaged African producers even more, making their 'geographical disadvantages' loom even larger.

[..] rich countries do not suffer from ethnic heterogeneity not because they do not have it but because they have succeeded in nation-building [...]

[...] The Japanese and German cultures were transformed with economic development, as the demands of a highly organized industrial society made people behave in more disciplined, calculating and cooperative ways. In that sense is more of an outcome, rather than a cause, of economic development. It is wrong to blame Africa's (or any region's or any country's) underdevelopment on its culture.

[...] the government picking winners may hurt some business interets but it may produce a better outcome from a social point of view.