AP Photo/Fred Waters
Questions of how the U.S. got mired in the Vietnam War and whether it was ultimately winnable have fascinated historians for half a century – most recently in Ken Burns’ new 18-hour documentary.
A little-remembered aspect of the debacle is the important role played by a prominent economic historian named Walt Whitman Rostow, whose theories on economic development helped persuade Americans – and two presidents – that the fight in Vietnam was right and that we must prevail.
The Burns documentary, from what I have seen, does not dwell much on economics, my area of expertise. But this was an important part of why Americans were there.
Rostow’s rise
In 1960, Rostow, then a professor at MIT, published an influential book called “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.” The book describes how an economy transitions through five distinct stages of development, from basic (little use of technology, like much of central Africa and South Asia in the mid 20th century) to advanced (characterized by high levels of mass consumption, such as the U.S. or France).
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