As thunder follows lightning, so calls for a “Marshall Plan” follow major disasters. It’s the symptom of a global economic discourse still in thrall to the promise of the immediate post-WW2 period, when we’d seen off Great Evil and were pretty confident that economics as a scientific enterprise that could guarantee results.
It turned out that there were a few more evils to come and that economics was embarrassingly low on scientific rigour; fast forward to economic collapse models, but the Marshall Plan remains inviolate. The Marshall Plan worked! and so calls for a Marshall Plan are, at root, calls for something that works.
Unfortunately this is the equivalent of porn for policy makers – long on skin but short on content, something that everybody can hang their own particular fantasies on. Calls for a Marshall Plan for [insert country name here] tends to come in three flavours:
a. Deliberately vague rhetoric.
b. Historically illiterate rhetoric.
c. Hilariously transparent rhetoric to ensure that funding will be channeled through the speaker’s own bureaucracy and/or replicate the speaker’s own institutional structures.
I tend to give credence to De Long and Eichengreen’s view that the Marshall Plan is best seen as a shot in the arm to recovery processes that were already underway in postwar Europe, rather than the genesis of that recovery. In this light, the idea of a Marshall Plan for Haiti makes no sense, because the various institutions aren’t in place to actually recover.