The unusually rapid pace of economic growth in Brazil's second major cyclical upswing in the postwar era (1968–74) has given rise to extensive comment and analysis. Much has been written about this experience and a “model” of Brazilian development that invariably emerges from these analyses emphasizes the following features: (1) rapid industrial growth; (2) the remarkable growth of exports; (3) an income concentrating wage policy; (4) institutional change creating a more effective and income elastic tax system; (5) reformed capital markets indexed for inflation and a semifloating exchange rate; (6) increased savings and investment; and (7) a rise in the foreign debt.

The most prevalent criticism of U.S. policy toward Latin America is that it takes Latin America for granted or that Latin America would be better off if it did. According to this view, Latin America is either neglected or treated shabbily. The florid rhetoric that U.S. policymakers sometimes use to describe the “special relationship” with Latin America raises expectations that are never fulfilled. Abraham Lowenthal has repeatedly described this policy cycle as “a burst of interest followed by concrete decisions that contradict the very policies just announced.” He continues, “Whether calling its approach a ‘Good Neighbor Policy,’ an ‘Alliance for Progress,’ [or] a ‘Mature Partnership,’ one administration after another has promised to improve U.S.-Latin American relations,” but all have failed.

“For Long it has Been the Conventional Wisdom—Repeated ad nauseum without ever an attempt at careful empirical demonstration—that the quality of Latin American studies is the lowest of all area scholarship. This judgment is clearly false for anthropology, history, and language and literature. How true is it for political science, one of the most maligned of the disciplines?” Thus, the question posed by a leading political scientist during the disciplinary soul-searching which followed in the wake of the Camelot affair. Perhaps none of the disciplines concerned with Latin American studies have been so subjected to self-conscious evaluations and assessments in recent years. While much has represented professional cocktail-gossip and conventioneering punditry, it has generally reflected the less than edifying overview of Merle Kling in the early 1960's. Countless political science graduate students with Latin American interests have read his assessment:

A little more than fifty years ago, French medievalist Marc Bloch (1928) tried to persuade his fellow historians of the importance and usefulness of the “comparative method.” Explanations, he argued, based on “those proverbs of common-sense psychology which have neither more nor less validity than their opposites” had to be replaced by causal explanations arrived at with the help of systematic comparison. In response to these exhortations, most historians, as Bloch himself noted, “express polite approval and then go back to work without changing their habits.” Nevertheless, the last decades have seen a remarkable growth in comparative studies in history as well as in the social sciences in general. Since 1959, the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History has played a crucial role in this regard. Yet the results of comparative historical studies have not been such as to challenge the skepticism of many historians who associate comparative approaches with facile analogies, pseudo-similarities, and questionable generalizations. Comparison too often seems to imply the sacrifice of the unique and differentiating features of each situation in the past for the sake of some broad scheme. Many historians are put off by social scientists, such as sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt (1963), whose ambitious comparative schema seem marked by typologizing with little empirical basis. To quote Bloch once more, the empirical historian will probably never become a philosopher of history or a sociologist although “he may, according to his state of mind, grant them admiration or a skeptical smile.”

The theme of the first world congress of rural sociology pointed to the importance of technological change in agricultural production throughout the world and the social changes that accompany or follow it.

Examples can indeed be found in Latin America of rural technological change being succeeded by social change, but that proposition alone does not provide a good characterization of the present rural scene. Great social changes are being incubated, there is much latent and some open conflict, but little technological change leading to development.

One of the most incompletely developed areas of the social sciences in the study of Latin America is the field of public administration. As the focus of external studies of Latin America, public administration suffers from a paucity of attention, and internally in Latin America, the subject has lagged behind other branches of political science in development.

La utilización de fuentes documentales de carácter demográfico es tardía en la historiografía chilena, los historiadores tradicionales utilizaron referencias indirectas y sin evaluación crítica ofreciendo sólo estimaciones globales de la población y de su distribución étnica. En 1934 se publicó una Contribución demográfica para la historia de Valparaíso por Luis Thayer Ojeda estudiándose en ella algunos problemas demográficos locales a la luz de los datos contenidos en los Registros Parroquiales y en los libros del Cementerio General e incluyéndose de paso las series de ambas fuentes hasta 1856. Este primer interés sin embargo no fructificó en una ampliación del uso de técnicas adecuadas a estas nuevas fuentes, excepto ocasionales intentos por dar a conocer otras series documentales como el Censo de la Capitanía General de Chile de 1777 publicado en 1940. A partir de 1950 en cambio se advierte un interés creciente por estudiar la historia de la población chilena con un método mas riguroso y con fuentes mas adecuadas como queda de manifiesto en el capítulo titulado “El desenvolvimiento histórico étnico de la Población de Chile” de la Geografía Económica de Chile y en la introducción con que se publicó el XII Censo General de la Población levantado en 1952. Por otra parte, se edita también una de las fuentes mas valiosas para el estudio de la demografía histórica chilena a fines del siglo XVIII y comienzos del XIX: El Censo de 1813.

Psychology is both a science and a profession. its development in any geographical area can be roughly gauged by such manifestations of scientific and professional activities as training, research and publication, and professional structures and organizations. The following analysis is based on a mail survey of schools of psychology conducted in late 1964 and personal visits by the author to thirty-two psychological institutions in Latin America in the summer of 1965.