The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor Author: William Easterly | Language: English | ISBN:
0465031250 | Format: PDF
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor Description
Review
Kirkus
"Easterly delivers a scathing assault on the anti-poverty programs associated with both the United Nations and its political and private sector supporters....A sharply written polemic intended to stir up debate about the aims of global anti-poverty campaigns."
Library Journal
“Easterly's research may help start a dialog about identifying better methods for alleviating global poverty and should assist readers interested in humanitarian efforts who want to draw their own conclusions about how to aid the world's poor."
Nancy Birdsall, President, Center for Global Development
“This book is deeply radical and thought-provoking, and brilliantly entertaining. Easterly invokes Kahneman, Hayek, Hirschman; the free cities of 12th century Genoa and 18th century New York; the Erie Canal, Fujian and Benin; the "prison" of the nation state; the new generation of econometrics applied to human history, and more in making his argument: It is individual rights and political freedoms that safeguard spontaneous, shared and sustained development, and the prevailing technocratic approach subverts those rights at great cost to the global poor its adherents would help. Development insiders will, with some justification, complain about one-sidedness and exaggeration. But no one who starts this book will be able to put it down, or be able to undo its influence on her thinking about the deep determinants of development progress.”
Angus Deaton, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Princeton University
“Knowledge and expertise are fountainheads of prosperity and freedom, yet experts, especially foreign experts, have frequently been instruments of the very oppression that they seek to alleviate. The Tyranny of Experts tells the extraordinary story of authoritarian development. Those not familiar with Easterly’s previous books are in for a revelation, and the many long time aficionados will be delighted to be back in the hands of the master.”
Paul Romer, New York University
"Easterly's new book shows that the expert approach to development rests on an engrained but unexamined premise: that people in poor countries cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. As this wide-ranging and compelling account shows, this assumption is doubly flawed. It's morally offensive and a sure guide to bad policy."
Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University
"Bill Easterly is simply the most interesting and provocative economist writing on development topics today."
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winner, Professor of Economics at Columbia University
"In this impassioned book, William Easterly draws on a wealth of examples from history and from around the world to support his forceful call for a radical transformation in the way the world views development. Easterly shows that many of the contemporary debates about the nature of development have their roots in history and he argues that the rights of the individual and democratic values should not be trampled on by those seeking faster economic growth."
Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"Bill Easterly is the development economist, and he has come up with yet another striking and original success. This is the book that puts together the role of government, the failures of experts, and the best way forward into one comprehensive package."
About the Author
William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and a director of NYU’s award-winning Development Research Institute. He lives in New York City.
- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books (March 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0465031250
- ISBN-13: 978-0465031252
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU, has written several iconoclastic books on economic development. His latest book is his best, in my view. The book provides a history of development policy from the early twentieth century onward. Easterly analyzes how what he labels "authoritarian development policy" -- state-run, top-down policy -- came to dominate the field of development so thoroughly.
Easterly sees the consequences of this dominance as being tragic, with governments and their hired experts having run roughshod over the interests of poor people. His book provides many examples of callous remarks by development officials dismissing the hardships their policies have imposed on people whose lives were plenty hard enough to begin with. Easterly is skeptical of the technocratic, data-driven policies that Bill Gates has been associated with in recent years, doubting the reliability of both the data these policies are based on and the rosy assessments of the outcomes of the policies.
Easterly worked for years at the World Bank and had a ringside seat at the formulation and implementation of the Bank's polices, most of which he now sees as ineffective and, often, counterproductive. He certainly has the credentials to make these arguments; it will be interesting to see what counterarguments the development policy establishment makes. I would hate to think that Easterly's arguments will be ignored, but he notes that similar arguments in the past have been.
Much as I like the book, I do have a few caveats. I like the fact that the book is fairly brief and very readable -- I probably wouldn't have read it if it hadn't been! -- but the scholarship seemed a trifle thin to me.
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