Status Updates From Edible Economics: The World...

As the intertwined story of the two noodle-obsessed nations, Korea and Italy,
shows, in the modern economy, entrepreneurship is not an individual deed any
more. It is a collective endeavour.

He’s been the world’s most successful and influential car designer of the last half a century.
Judging from what he says about it, Giugiaro is taking the Marille debacle as an amusing interlude in his stupendous career. In a 1991 interview, he said: ‘I owe my popular fame to that pasta, I got even published in Newsweek, isn’t it funny?’

Giugiaro literally ‘engineered’ a beautiful, futuristic pasta shape, made up of
a tube combined with a wave. The shape was called Marille and was launched
with a fanfare in 1983. Unfortunately, it was a total failure. The production run
was limited, and the distribution poor, so it was difficult to get hold of. More
importantly, the complex shape made it difficult to cook evenly. +

Without infant industry protection, all those countries that were once
economic shrimps – like Britain in the eighteenth century, the US, Germany, and Sweden in the nineteenth century or Japan, Finland and Korea in the twentieth century – would not have been able to turn themselves into the big fish of today’s world economy.

Moreover, when you acquire such capabilities, it becomes possible to sustain your standard of living at a high level over a long period of time, because capabilities do not ‘run out’ in the way natural resources do, like non-renewable mineral resources, such as saltpetre, or renewable resources that almost inevitably get over-exploited and depleted, like Peruvian guano from birds feeding on anchovies.

When you acquire higher productive capabilities through industrialization,
you can overcome the constraints that nature has put on you in the most
‘magical’ ways – you can conjure up the most vivid red dye from the blackest
coal, make fertilizer out of thin air and expand your landmass by many multiples without invading another country. +

However, what is clear is that poor people in poor countries are poor largely
because of historical, political and technological forces that are beyond their
control, rather than because of their individual shortcomings, least of all their
unwillingness to work hard.