[1] Rostow asserts that countries go through each of these stages fairly linearly, and set out a number of conditions that were likely to occur in investment, consumption and social trends at each state.
Rostow's model is descendent from the liberal school of economics, emphasizing the efficacy of modern concepts of free trade and the ideas of Adam Smith.
In that way, Rostow's model does not deny John Maynard Keynes in that it allows for a degree of government control over domestic development not generally accepted by some ardent free trade advocates.
In discussing the take-off, Rostow is a noted early adopter of the term “transition”, which is to describe the passage of a traditional to a modern economy.
Society makes such terms as it will with the requirements of modern efficient production, balancing off the new against the older values and institutions, or revising the latter in such ways as to support rather than to retard the growth process.
This diversity leads to greatly reduced rates of poverty and rising standards of living, as a society no longer needs to sacrifice its comfort in order to strengthen certain sectors.
The age of high mass consumption refers to the period of contemporary comfort afforded many western nations, wherein consumers concentrate on durable goods, and hardly remember the subsistence concerns of previous stages.
Of particular note is the fact that Rostow's "Age of High Mass Consumption" dovetails with (occurring before) Daniel Bell's hypothesized "Post-Industrial Society."
The suggestion is that mature economies may implicitly destabilize and cycle back-and-forth between the final stages of the Rostovian-Bell developmental phases as they rebalance themselves, over time, and re-evolve their economic base.
2: Rostow is mechanical in the sense that the underlying motor of change is not disclosed and therefore the stages become little more than a classificatory system based on data from developed countries.
4: His model assumes the inevitable adoption of Neoliberal trade policies which allow the manufacturing base of a given advanced polity to be relocated to lower-wage regions.
To Rostow, if a country can be a disciplined, uncorrupt investor in itself, can establish certain norms into its society and polity, and can identify sectors where it has some sort of advantage, it can enter into transition and eventually reach modernity.