The “Vanderbilt Boys” and the Modernization of Brazilian Economics

Abstract

Economics as a scholarly discipline was transformed in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, when many countries in the region received financial and academic support from US institutions ostensibly aimed at “modernizing” the standards of training and research in the field. Even though Chile remains the most well-known case, similar developments took place in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere. In Brazil, the restructuring of economics derived much of its strength from a cooperation agreement signed between Vanderbilt University and the University of São Paulo, financially backed by USAID and the Ford Foundation. This article recovers the early postwar origins of this partnership, the process through which it was implemented during the 1960s, and its influence in reshaping Brazilian scholarly standards. Just as the University of Chicago left a lasting mark on Chilean economics, Vanderbilt also became a pervasive point of reference for the future development of the discipline in Brazil. Different actors, institutions, and contexts, however, ultimately produced quite distinct results in each case.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Development Economist

“…In 1954, the university inaugurated a Summer Institute on Economic Development, a training program designed for students coming from less developed areas, which in 1956 morphed into the Graduate Program in Economic Development (GPED). The initiative built on the groundwork laid by Vanderbilt’s Institute for Brazilian Studies, active between 1947 and 1953, and especially on the vision of Reynold Carlson, Georgescu-Roegen’s friend and colleague, who had by then already accumulated a great deal of experience working on aid missions to Latin America (Suprinyak and Fernandez 2021). The program was initially funded by the International Cooperation Administration, and subsequently received generous grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.…”

“…After the manuscript of Analytical Economics was finished, Georgescu-Roegen returned to Brazil in 1966 as part of the recently signed agreement between Vanderbilt and the University of São Paulo (Suprinyak and Fernandez 2021). Upon gaining some first-hand knowledge of the inflationary problems confronting the Brazilian economy, he offered a theoretical treatment of the subject in “Structural Inflation-Lock and Balanced Growth” ([1970] 1976), showing how “prolonged inflation in a country with a strong inheritance of ‘feudalistic’ social and economic” institutions tended to produce an industrial structure that can be sustained only by “an artificial maintenance of the effective demand for ‘superior’, i.e., luxury, consumer goods.” 45 Once again, he built on his long-standing interest in dual economic structures to explore how certain institutional patterns found in less developed societies constrained their capacity to generate a self-sustaining process of economic growth 46 .…”