… is from page 115 of Benn Steil’s and Manuel Hinds’s great 2009 book, Money, Markets & Sovereignty:
Development requires helping the poor find their way from farm to factory, and from factory to office, classroom, and laboratory. This requires massive investment, which in turn requires sophisticated financial intermediation. It is for this reason that the trade and financial dimensions of globalization are complementary.
DBx: Yes. And here we have yet another economic reality that is ignored by American Compass-types who decry the size of the finance sector. Such people are not merely ignorant of economics, they are naive physicalists. In their eyes, production consists chiefly in transforming matter into different combinations and shapes. Moreover, nearly all acts of transforming matter into different combinations and shapes are, in the minds of theses physicalists, ipso facto productive.
The economic ignorance that gives rise to this physicalist myth reflects primitive thinking.
