Technology, inequality, and underdevelopment: The case of Latin America

The conventional wisdom is that the best way to alleviate poverty is to provide the maximum freedom for individual entrepreneurs and corporations to create wealth. Drawing on the case of Latin America, this article contends that there are serious defects in analyses based on such assumptions. New technologies and restructuring of international capitalism have accelerated wealth creation worldwide but amid growing inequalities. Technology is mainly controlled by large multinational corporations and not directed at relieving the deprivation suffered by the world's poor. Pervasive, persistent economic inequality and lack of access to appropriate education and training have all been significant in Latin America's failure to develop rapidly during the twentieth century. Most successful "latecomer" countries in the past two hundred years have adopted heterodox autonomous growth strategies, and the authors suggest that such strategies are necessary now to counter the powerful processes that sustain inequality.