ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ANALYSTS have long been preoccupied with those dimensions and forces at work in traditional culture and belief that affect the direction of change and the receptivity of a society to innovation. One element of social organization and social structure commonly associated with modernization and economic development is the availability of a pool of commercial, entrepreneurial, professional, and technical abilities and talents which generally tend to be drawn from those occupational groups often referred to as middle class (1). In point of historical fact, middle class growth was a powerful driving force in the economic and sociopolitical development of Western Europe. Economic power became diffused throughout a new, individualistic, and independent class which successfully broke the political and cultural monopoly of a traditional landowning elite. Recognizing the historical importance of an expanding middle class in social and economic change, contemporary conventional theory assigns it a vital developmental role: "It is clear from many country studies that the growth of a robust middle class remains of crucial importance in contemporary low-income nations" (2). Despite the usefulness of the theories of Marx, Sombart, Schumpeter, Gerschenkron and others for interpreting middle class growth and understanding the historical changes which accompanied it in the West, it is argued here that the dynamic forces of change and modernization in Latin America may be radically different from those that operated in the presently developed Western countries. In their institutional apparatuses occupational groupings, technologies, and ideologies, the economically underdeveloped countries of Latin America are neither wholly in the position of the Western countries of today nor of those countries two or four centuries past. In some respects the Latin American countries are already developed societies, but not in ways that can provide their populations with the economic opportunity and freedom, the productivity, and hence the standard of life to which they aspire. Theories generalizing from earlier, successful development experiences must be applied with extreme caution in analyzing economic, social, and political change in contemporary low-income countries (3). The possible existence of putatively positive aspects of middle class

Middle Class Growth and Economic Development in Latin America

this article questions the favorable view of integrated programs of family planning health and other services taken by Bruce F. Johnston and Anthony J. Meyer in their paper "Nutrition Health and Population in Strategies for Rural Development." The type of program endorsed by Johnston and Meyer apparently places the specialized services of maternal and child health with added emphasis on nutrition together with family planning under the administrative direction of the Ministry of Health. The author notes that despite Johnston and Meyers argument that the current approach has had only limited effectiveness it is not yet possible to show that specialized programs have more limited effectiveness than integrated programs. The Narangwal Project in India should not be considered to demonstrate the effectiveness of an integrated approach before assessing the impact on it of the "Hawthorne effect" and the role of international assistance. Considerable evidence suggests that the administrative problems of the Indian family planning program would be exacerbated by further integration. Integration of administration and integration of service delivery are 2 separate aspects serving different group interests. Administrative integration under the control of the medical profession would give control to the professional group whose economic and status interests are responsible for the hospital and curative bias of health services and the limited role of paramedical personnel.

The Political Economy of Integration in Development Strategies: Comment on Johnston and Meyer [Nutrition, Health, and Population in Strategies for Rural Development]

Implicit in any description of conditions in the recently developing less developed countries is the assumption that their processes of production and distribution operate within rigidly stratified societal structures. Of course, for many of these recently developing countries, their strata are neither perfectly static nor absolutely rigid. Nevertheless, and particularly in the least developed and the most slowly developing, rigidity will be an appropriate assumption. Where it is relatively strong, it will be a limitation to the growth process of an importance equal to if not greater than that of the real economic ones, such as low levels of savings, and equal to if not more important than those of a physical nature, such as a lack of readily accessible natural resources. Stratification is a system of group relationships. However, no one system is likely to be universally applicable nor perfectly reproduced, even in a limited sample of less developed countries. The reason for this is that both the level and the rate of development will affect the diversity of groups and their relationships. A developing country is not only expanding the scope of its market economy but, concomitantly, the potential, if not the real, specialization of its economic, social, and political functions. To the extent that this specialization be realized in the area of economic activities, there will be an increase in the number of steps and groups involved in production and distribution and an increase in the complexity of their relationships. Since the level and rate of development will differ from country to country, the degree of diversity among the groups and the complexity of their relationships will vary. Therefore, the system of social stratification of any one country will not be perfectly reproduced in any other country. Given a country's system of social stratification, rigidity will be an element influencing the relationships between the various groups. As such, it is the converse of vertical mobility and is directly a function of the growth process. Economic development, even if narrowly thought of as merely a process of industrial expansion, should reduce the rigidities in the system of social stratification by increasing the opportunities for vertical economic

Externalities in the Displacement of Traditional Elites

In several of the more recent issues of Economic Development and Cultural Change there have been reviews of and comments about a body of literature neither exclusively nor particularly economic, dealing with a presumably new approach to economic growth or development. The work of Bruce Johnston and Anthony J. Meyer is an example.' This approach tends to focus on the conditions and the needs of the lowest possible denominator in the development process-that is, individuals living in rural poverty and those who share this condition living within reasonable physical proximity of a village. This new approach concerns itself not only with explicit descriptions of the economic conditions of the subject matter but, even more important, with a series of policy recommendations about what should be done and how responsible governments are to proceed to correct these conditions and to provide these village populations, not just with a real share of national wealth, but also with improved means for participating in the system. According to this body of literature, basic human services-health, family planning, education-need to be provided to the rural poor by some kind of \"integrated delivery system.\" As has been suggested recently by Ness, this term can mean the merging of several administrative systems, each originally providing a single service, into a single administrative service to provide a variety of basic human needs services.2 Another meaning, however, implies that a number of basic services are all provided by a single operating entity at the point of delivery.

Alvin Cohen

Papers

Externalities in the Displacement of Traditional Elites

The Macroeconomic versus the Microeconomic Approach to Development: The Futility of Development Efforts as a Function of Institutional Inertia