Political Economy of Policy Reform in Developing Countries (Ohlin Lectures) Hardcover – 5 July 1993

In my bygone salad days I was a graduate student in political science at UCLA. Reading this book brought me right back to those lost hours in the University Research Library. And, guess what? Just like so much else of the garbage I slogged through back then, this book is worthless. It's not just the almost unbelievably bad writing. The turgid prose. The repetititousness. The use of ten words when five would communicate precisely the same ideas. The incredible density of the passive voice. Of them all, the tendentious exactitude is my favorite. And my absolute favorite example of that: the repeated use of both the singular and the plural to express one thought: "the farmer or farmers purchasing fertilizers"; "the administrator or administrators assessing needs"; "the bureaucracy or bureacracies administering the government or governments". You get the picture. Even as badly written as it is, it might be worth slogging through the book if there was even one original idea anywhere to be found in it. There isn't. All of this record breaking turgidity is in the service of saying exactly the same bit of neoliberal groupthink that you could find in fifteen other books bopping around in 1990. And, as a bonus, there's next to no systematic evidence. None. Zip. Just a long, and, yes, turgid concatenation of words smugly regurgitating the zeitgeist. And another thing...The book was published in 1990 and there's no mention whatsoever of China, just as it was on the verge of demolishing anti-statist development theories. Goes to show you something about the navel gazers of academia. To wit: they are far more often super-smug and imperiously self-assured than they are right about anything.