Rostow was born in New York in 1916, the son of a Jewish immigrant family from Russia. He went to Yale at the age of 15 and he then spent three years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. His early career was interspersed with teaching, research and spells in government service. From 1950 to 1961, he was professor of economic history at MIT. During that time he was one of Eisenhower's speech writers, and he was subsequently appointed as one of President Kennedy's political advisor. He was promoted to national security advisor under President Johnson. After that he returned to academia, teaching and researching at the University of Texas until his retirement. Rostow's most famous book, published in 1960 was The Stages of Economic Growth, A Non-Communist Manifesto. In Rostow's scheme of things, all societies were eventually destined to pass through five stages of economic growth. Having started in a phase of traditional society, they moved to a pre-conditioned phase where some of the essential building block for subsequent growth were slotted into place. They then followed a take-off, a relatively short period of accelerated growth which set it on track for the rest of it's journey. The take-off was accompanied by a rapid rise in investment from a relatively modest starting point, and the emergence of one or more leading sectors. Next came a drive to maturity stage before eventually settling down in a land of mass consumption which like the United States in the 1950s. Possibly because of its subtitle, it was an instant bestseller. It was a short and snappy book with a clear message. Sort out the basic social conditions for entrepreneurship, inject sufficient capital, and state could be propelled away from poverty and the lure of communism towards a society of plenty. And this simple and technocratic message found a ready response in American policy. It reinforced Eisenhower's resolve to employ foreign aid as a weapon in the Cold War. And it deeply influenced the subsequent aid policies of the Kennedy administration. Such was the impact of the book that in 1960, the International Economics Association devoted an entire conference to the theme of The Take-Off. All the papers, including a record of the debates, were published in 1963 and Rostow, bravely, was the editor. Well, it was a brave decision, because basically the conference filleted, examined, and utterly destroyed the thesis. Almost nothing remained intact. The stages were not sufficiently distinct, the timing of the take-offs were contested. The explanatory mechanisms were defective, and the single empirical fact in the story, the doubling of investments was simply not there. For young under graduate, finding the work on his reading list several years later, it was all hefty stuff and it help convince me to specialize in economic history. But at least I had learned not to take the thesis seriously. The same cannot be said for many economists for whom the metaphor still holds a strong appeal. Even today, there are articles published on the Take-Off or the absence thereof in one or other country.
