This approach was countered by the theory of unbalanced growth, formulated by Albert Hirschman. For Hirschman, development was a “chain of disequilibria,” and the task of development policy was to maintain tensions, disproportions, and disequilibria. Hirschman attacked the balanced growth thesis, arguing that problems of industrialization did not require a simultaneous solution, as claimed by Rosenstein-Rodan, Nurkse, and others. Indeed, new industrialization processes in the underdeveloped countries needed solutions that were essentially different from those undertaken by the older industrial countries. Instead of emphasizing obstacles to economic progress, like land tenure systems, family structure, administrative instability, lack of savings, and so on, Hirschman stressed the need for inducement mechanisms. In his view, the fundamental problem of development consisted in generating and channeling human energies in a desired direction. He found the big-push theory to be unrealistic in that it relied on resources (like investment capital) that poor countries had in short supply. For Hirschman (1958), the greatest shortage in poor counties was entrepreneurship, or the ability to perceive opportunities and make investment decisions. The notion of unbalanced growth was based on creating situations where people were forced to make investment decisions by deliberately unbalancing different sectors of the economy. If certain parts of the economy are made to grow (by state investment, for instance), shortages in other sectors will force investments for their growth. The initial unbalancing should be done in an activity that has strong backward and forward linkages (Ilchman and Bhargava 1966). In Hirschman’s conception, backward linkages corresponded to the stimuli going to sectors that supplied the inputs required by a particular activity, whereas forward linkages were the inducement to set up new activities utilizing the output of the proposed activity. The main source of development would be activities with high-potential linkage effects, mainly backward ones. The idea that industrial development should (and in fact would) proceed largely through backward linkages was quite revolutionary at the time: instead of doing things in the conventional way, industrial development would work its way from the “last touches” to intermediate and basic industry. Industrialization of certain leading sectors would pull along the rest of the economy. In this sense, it was not feasible or desirable to suppress the tensions and disequilibria created by the development process, since there was a “creative virtue” in them.