Lauchlin Currie and Albert O. Hirschman worked together as advisers to the National Planning Council in Colombia in the 1950s. Both had little experience in development economics when they arrived, and did not see eye to eye about the functioning and policy recommendations of the council. Retracing their debates on internal and public issues using archival sources shows how the Colombian experience marked their views on the role of policy advisers, development policy, and the obstacles to development processes. Our main contribution is to show how this experience contributed to form their theories of development, which evolved from technical discussions on growth mechanics to the necessity of adopting a development strategy dealing with issues of political economy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.