Education, a key to development or to emigration?

Education is increasingly regarded as the key to expanding wealth in the Third World. In countries like Haiti, which specialize in non-mechanized production - in technological dead-ends - raising the level of education of the population will not help to increase the level of wealth in the population. In such countries the demand for educated personnel is minimal. Education is more likely to increase the propensity to emigrate. 

A strategy based on education succeeds only when combined with an industrial policy that also provides work for educated people, as happened in East Asia. 

-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 114

More:

• How rich countries got rich... (Erik S. Reinert)
• Voting with your feet (Paul Collier)

Reinert's Critique on Modern Economics

Standard textbook economics is created as an abstraction from an economic scenario in the same way that the game of chess is created as an abstraction of a war scenario. But just as the war in Iraq is not solved by referring to the rules of chess, the problems of world poverty are not solved by referring to an economic theory that does not contain key variables from factual knowledge. 

-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 34

Sombart's driving forces of capitalism

Werner Sombart considers capitalism as a kind of historic coincidence, in which factors are brought together by a whole range of circumstances. Economic wealth is a result of its being willed, a result of a conscious policy. the driving forces of capitalism, which create both the foundation and the conditions for the system, are, according to Sombart:

1. The entrepreneur, who represents what Nietzsche calls the 'capital of human wit and will', the human agent who takes the initiative to have something produced or traded.

1. The modern state, which creates the institutions enabling improvements in production and distribution, and creates the incentives that make the vested interest of the entrepreneur coincide with the vested interests of society at large. Institutions encompass everything from legislation to infrastructure, patents to protect new ideas, schools, universities, and standardization of units of measurements, for example.

1. The machine process, i.e. what was long called industrialism: mechanization of production creating higher productivity and technological change with innovations under economies of scale and synergies. This concept is very close to what we today call the 'national innovation system'.

-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 120 - 121