"A country is poor because it is poor."
This seemingly banal or paradoxical phrase was one of the first truly systematic explanations of why underdevelopment tended to reproduce itself. I first read it years ago and it struck me. It wasn't a tautology. It was an attempt to express something profound in simple words.
From simple description to mechanism
In the 1950s, pioneering economists were no longer content to simply list the problems of underdevelopment (little industry, too much agriculture, low productivity, etc.). They wanted to understand why these problems fed off each other, in a cycle that seemed impossible to break spontaneously.
Thus was born the idea of the vicious circle : a system of causes and effects that continually reinforce each other, keeping poor societies trapped in stagnation.
How the club works
The classic mechanism was this:
- Low labor productivity → low per capita income
- Low income → almost all the product is consumed to survive → very little savings
- Very little savings → very little investment
- Little investment → outdated technologies and insufficient infrastructure
- Backward technologies → low productivity again
And the cycle starts again, identical to itself.
There was also a more "human" version of the cycle: poverty generates malnutrition, which generates poor health, which reduces the ability to work, which perpetuates poverty. A vicious cycle that operated both individually and collectively.
A self-sustaining system
Economists of the time multiplied the factors involved: demographics (a high birth rate that absorbed every little gain), rigid social structures, low levels of education, weak institutions. Each element reinforced the others. They spoke of a veritable "circular constellation of forces."
Underdevelopment was no longer seen as a sum of isolated shortcomings, but as a self-reproducing state. A perverse equilibrium.
The basic hypothesis (and its limits)
Behind this model lay a powerful assumption: the causes of underdevelopment were predominantly internal (endogenous) to poor societies themselves. It was their behaviors, their culture, their social structures that held them back.
This vision had a clear political consequence: the responsibility fell largely on poor countries. To break the cycle, strong external intervention—aid, investment, technology transfer—was needed, capable of "breaking" the mechanism.
The first cracks in the model
However, significant critical issues soon emerged. First and foremost, logical: if the cycle is truly vicious and closed, how did today's rich countries escape it? The model struggled to explain Europe's historical development.
Furthermore, it assumed that Western economic categories (saving, investment, propensity to consume) functioned the same everywhere. But in many traditional societies, more income did not automatically mean more saving: it could be transformed into ceremonial consumption, social status, or family redistribution. Income distribution was often ignored. And this was a serious mistake.
The critical voices
Not everyone agreed with this narrow, internalized view. Gunnar Myrdal, for example, argued that underdevelopment was not a state of stable equilibrium, but was also the result of external forces: the "free" functioning of the international market tended to generate cumulative inequalities, creating virtuous circles in some areas and vicious ones in others.
It was the beginning of a debate that would shape the entire sociology of development: endogenous vs. exogenous, internal vs. external causes.
The lesson of the vicious circle
The vicious circle model was important because it was the first to try to explain underdevelopment not as a list of problems, but as an interdependent system.
It described the trap well . It explained why it was so difficult to escape by internal forces alone. But it had a profound limitation: it was too mechanical, too internal, too lacking in historical context. It failed to adequately explain how that circle had formed or how to truly escape it.
But it remains a powerful metaphor. Even today, when we see countries trapped in persistent poverty, malnutrition, poor education, and weak institutions, that "vicious cycle" continues to come to mind.
It reminds us that development is never just a matter of goodwill or technical recipes. It's also a matter of breaking historical mechanisms that have been self-perpetuating for decades, if not centuries.
And this, perhaps, is the hardest lesson the pioneers left us.
