One of the few experts outside government who calls himself "optimistic" about out the Alliance for Progress swept rapidly through the program's history and prospects yesterday, and put some Latin American economic problems perspective.

Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, Professor of Economics at M.I.T., suggested some of the reasons why progress in the Alliance's first year--even considering that economic development is a slow process has been "infinitesimal."

He pointed out that the Alliance's chief trouble is that it comes late, during the dying-down of Latin American idealogical enthusiasm for development. The Latin intelligentsia, he related, began to lose faith in development as a "Sorelian myth" when the high rate of growth 1950-55 slowed, and when it became clear that even increase in national income had caused no profound social change.

American unwillingness to approve a sustained program of aid before now means that the Alliance has entered an atmosphere in which disillusioned intellectuals have turned to Marxism, and strains and contrasts have increased between the social groups that profited from postwar economic growth and those that didn't.

Seeking "National Identity"

After all, Rosenstein-Rodan said smiling, Latin America "is passing through a phase where it has to find its own national identity"; it finds it difficult to accept a complete shift in U.S. foreign economic policy after traditionally using the U.S. as an "object of common hatred." To the man in the street, partly because of an "unholy" agreement between Communists and conservatives, the Alliance is completely "unknown."

Recounting a little usually forgotten history, the economist described Brazilian President Kubitschek's original conception of the Alliance as "Operation America." Out of it grew the Quitandinha Conference of 1954, in which first proposed the idea of Latin American countries cooperating in a partnership for sustained economic growth.

The plan differed from conventional programs by "reversing the burden responsibility" for development "from creditor to debtor country."

Eventually, Rosenstein-Rodan went on, the U.S. accepted the nation of such an Alliance at Punta del Este--with the difference in basic thinking that change in social conditions is a precondition of development. The economist approved of this new requirement, but added that trying to promote equal distribution of income naturally costs far more and arouses more opposition than simply trying to make income grow.