hello and welcome to an edition of chi the contemporaries intervention
that comes to you from a different location than usual this is the centre of Birmingham
and behind me you see the construction side of the Curzon street railroad station the project
that means to link Birmingham via high-speed rail to Birmingham hs2 is a project that comes
with great promise it is meant to push into her country right become an engine of growth that is
what the locals say it's hs2 engine off-road always being well today we had the second
week of our discussion in our advanced option the messier and we talked about
development and the promise and the magic of economic growth and I think this construction
site is a good place to reflect on that promise the magic of the big development project that
seeks to bring an entire country forward and the question overhanging to the suggestions well how
do we talk about the promise of development and economic growth in the 21st century well
listening to the students in class today well I think the answer is we don't really know
but we know that this is not because we're immune to the magic of these projects but because we no
longer have the words now hs2 is I guess familiar to everybody who's following the news in the uk
it's notorious for cost overruns and delays it is a familiar litany of so many development projects
over the last years and decades they're too expensive they're too clunky they don't deliver
what people are promised but it turns out that was not the litany that our students want to hear
there are children of austerity they don't care too much about spending money and going into debt
if that is the government they like the idea of an activist government that builds infrastructure
projects like they're concern about hs2 is about geography that this project which links Birmingham
and London increases the degree of economic inequality in this country hs2 may become
an engine for growth but only for certain places well like this wonderful city and that
means that entire regions will be left behind and fall back even more I found that the surprising
point from my students because in my lecture I pointed out that the idea of a British a
national boom of the economy was pretty much a result of the boom years the
years of enormous national growth in the 1950s and 60s the historical normal is not
national growth but regional growth the industrial revolution was a regional phenomenon
and if the economics is any guide we're moving towards the same regional pattern in the 21st
century we still have growth but we have it in regional economic clusters and not as a national
phenomenon that is the way that this country seems to be going and I guess well our students say
well if that is the way Britain goes that's not the country that's not the path that I
that we want and when I suggested in class that well if you want all the amenities if you want
strong growth if you want splendid infrastructure male just maybe just move to the places
that have it well this suggestion was met with that silence that is not the country that people
want was this the long shadow of the bloom years where there was actually such a thing
as an entire country that is getting better well I’m not so sure the post-war years are really
distant for the today's student generation this is well the 21st century equivalent to daddy's
stories from the war yeah maybe there was a boom back then in the 50s and 60s but that's
a long time ago and anyway it wasn't all that's impressive in this country if you look at the
us that's where the real boom was the promise of the 50s and 60s comes across as very much
a promise of the american way of life and you've probably heard that America is not
the shining city that it used to be this week's mandatory reading was Alexander Gerschenkron
's famous essay on economic backwardness and historical perspective it's an essay that is now
70 years old but it's really prescient if you read it nowadays and think of china it's really
an essay that is instructive in diagnosing what economic backwardness is and also how backwardness
can actually turn into an advantage because in a way china did exactly what Gerschenkron
suggested back in 1952 it is a used to be a backward country but it took advantage
of backwardness by focusing development on specific high-tech projects looking at the
latest technology looking at technology that is developing rapidly makes it easier for countries
to catch up that's what Gerschenkron said in 1952 well if you look at the it boom and that
boom in china I guess there is something to this Gerschenkron talked about how important it is to
have an activist interventionist state that provides the capital and maybe if something
more again Gerschenkron is quite on the mark and Gerschenkron stressed that there needs to
be an ideology of growth an idea that provides the country with the right spirit and that's
certainly the case for china if you look at what happened there in the 90s and in this millennium
the promise of economic growth the benefits of affluence really are crucial for buying legitimacy
for the communist regime in china so are there any problems here well maybe there are side effects
maybe there are aspects of the boom that are not always beneficial that's what our students
are aware of but by and large they're not so much into this post-materialist argument coming from
today's classroom discussion my feeling is well this entire argument about societies moving from
material values to post-material values is maybe a bit overdone material benefits concrete
benefits and infrastructure terms still hold their allure for today's
students they were probably more concerned with what an industrial spirit means for workers
because we all know that Chinese workers and generally workers in a factory need to
heat a certain rhythm and again that is something that Gerschenkron was very much aware of back in
1952 that he stressed how getting workers into the right discipline for the factory
is no small challenge so what's the problem from today's perspective for today's students
with Gerschenkron's essay of 1952 well it turned out it was the language the rhetoric of
backwardness the rhetoric about advancement that came across as arrogant patronizing Eurocentric
stories of the old west that has the right spirit versus the rest of the world that's just not
in the right mood and Georgetown excitement about elite visions of progress well the words no longer
fly where does that leave us well in the 1950s prime minister Harold Macmillan won an election
by declaring you've never had it so good well what would a politician what should a politician say
now what would he say or she say to students who want to what the benefits of infrastructure
they want good traffic links and not just to metropolitan centres but for the entire country
who want good internet connections everywhere but students who are wary of the language of progress
and backwardness well I don't know what we say I know that the language of development
and economic growth has run its course while we still have the same old aspirations in our heads