The Lucky Country Syndrome in Australia: Resources, Social Democracy, and Regimes of Development in Historical Political Economy Perspective 1 Christopher Lloyd School of Business, Economics and Public Policy University of New England, Australia and Nordic Centre of Excellence on the Nordic Welfare State (Nordwel) Helsinki University, Finland Email:
[email protected] Paper presented to Asia Pacific Economic and Business History Conference Canberra, 16-18 February, 2012. SECOND (INCOMPLETE) DRAFT, February 2011. 1 This evolving paper, still an incomplete work-in-progress, is in the spirit (but needing additional work) of the critical realist socio-political-economy tradition of historical research into past and present of Karl Polanyi, Albert Hirschman, and Barrington Moore, a tradition that was eclipsed some decades ago by rational choice, ahistorical, political economy, but which still has much to offer. Polanyi‟s rejection of economic abstractionism and his conceptualization of the formal/substantive distinction seems to me to be essential to the study of long-run socio-economic history. Attempts to understand the present crisis of the world economy could do worse than adopt the interdisciplinary outlook of Polanyi and of Hirschman, neither of whom could ever have been pigeon-holed into a single box such as economic development theorist or political theorist or economic historian. Hirschman‟s attempts to understand the complexities of macro-social processes over time showed an exemplary skepticism about simplistic models and spurious quantification of over-aggregate variables, and a constant concern to study the local specifics of cases within a theoretical framework that rejected the abstraction of the economy from culture, society, and politics.