The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor Paperback – March 24, 2015

I highly recommended Easterly's new work to my staff. Here is an excellent review from one of those who read it:William Easterly – The Tyranny of ExpertsReviewed by Katelyn G.William Easterly's The Tyranny of Experts is an eye-opening book andworthwhile reading for anyone who wants to work in development or gain a deeperunderstanding of effective methods to alleviate poverty. The book serves as a strongargument in favor of spontaneous solutions to problems in development over anauthoritarian, technocratic approach that denies individual rights. Through manyhistorical examples from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, Easterly demonstratesthat although technocratic solutions may solve some development problems in the shortterm, greater long-term prosperity can be achieved in societies that promote free trade,innovation and entrepreneurship.The sense of history within The Tyranny of Experts is one of its great strengths.Critiquing “Blank Slate” thinking throughout the book, Easterly provides valuablehistorical context to educate the reader on how current development thinking evolved,tracing its beginnings to the post-colonial era, when Western powers needed a reason toretain power and influence as their empires collapsed. Later, Cold War strategy wouldlead countries like the United States to support autocratic leaders and technocraticdevelopment initiatives that helped it retain influence in the face of the Communist threat.It is clear that the Western approach to development has always served multiple politicalpurposes.Easterly’s emphasis on history over the long term enables him to highlight howdifferent practices work over generations. For example, in discussing the insular tradingpractices among the Maghribi people, Easterly is able to identify how the level of trustbetween group members facilitated trade, but ultimately inhibited prosperity by limitingwith whom the group could and would trade. Again, Easterly brings home the messagethat history must not be ignored, and therefore a good solution in one country may not bethe right solution for another based on the specific context of each.Throughout The Tyranny of Experts, we see that poverty is complex, and notcaused by a lack of talent or intelligence among people who are just waiting fordevelopment experts to save them (as the deeply racist post-colonial leaders seem to havethought). This examination of history and motive makes for an exciting read, providing anew lens through which to review topics most of us have researched before, like the slavetrade. Easterly argues that, “oppression has broad consequences that hold backdevelopment” (159). He explains that even today, countries from which people weretaken to be sold as slaves experience greater levels of poverty, and are more reluctant totrade with local neighboring communities that helped capture their people. Italy serves asanother example Easterly provides to highlight the long term consequences of oppressionas the author shows how Italian cities that experienced absolute rule in the twelfthcentury and were more restricted in trade do not fare as well even today as those thatwere free cities. A history of limited rights and damaged relationships negatively impactstrade opportunities, thereby inhibiting development. Easterly’s examples demonstrate thatthose consequences can last for centuries.The book maintains credibility by acknowledging arguments his detractors couldmake about the success of technocratic initiatives. Easterly questions solutions that, atfirst glance, seem to have worked. One example provided is an autocratic Ethiopia’sreduction of child mortality, which led to accolades from leaders and influences likeTony Blair and Bill Gates. Easterly acknowledges this perceived success, but uncoversflaws in reporting that call into question whether such results are worth. We find thatchildhood mortality data is known to be imprecise, especially in nations where birth anddeath rates are not reliably reported (123). Meanwhile, this Ethiopian regime was knownfor oppressing political rivals and denying them food aid, a fact ignored by those whowere celebrating the regime’s success in health initiatives.I also want to credit Easterly for consistency in his approach. When he argues infavor of protecting individual rights to promote prosperity, he values the individual abovethe state. I was struck by his inclusion of arguments in favor of freedom of movement,which particularly caught my attention, as the immigration debate is ever ongoing.Easterly gives the example that most Haitians who have lifted themselves out of povertyare living outside of Haiti. In addition, he questions why a skilled professional like adoctor from a poorer country should remain at home out of loyalty to the needs of his orher country, particularly when that individual could live a much more prosperous life byrelocating to the United States. To see Easterly treat individual rights with enoughimportance to transcend borders was especially refreshing after reading through the manyways that racism has influenced development policy.The ultimate purpose of all of this history, all these different case studies fromacross the world, is to highlight how an emphasis on individual rights is proven to lead togreater prosperity. Although an autocrat may be able to accomplish specific developmentgoals faster, it may not be sustainable or worth the price of oppression. Easterly writesthat, “oppression has broad consequences that hold back development” (159). As we haveseen in the examples I have cited, the negative consequences of autocratic rule can lastfor generations.Of course, moving away from autocracies cannot happen overnight, and in certaincases it may make sense to support positive initiatives that will promote health, andtherefore prosperity, even if the government itself is deeply flawed. In reading TheTyranny of Experts, I appreciated that Easterly is ever grounded in reality, and the authorposits that, “an incremental positive change in freedom will yield a positive change inwell-being for the world's poor.” Although change will not happen instantaneously,moving toward greater autonomy will encourage innovation, trade and prosperity.Easterly concludes that we must not be “seduced” by seemingly benevolentautocrats, whose power means that they can accomplish development goals faster, but attoo great a cost. It is here that I believe Easterly misses an opportunity. I would have beeninterested to see the book discuss the rights of women in relation to autocracies. To me,this would have been particularly relevant, as rights for women have been known toincrease under autocrats. Under Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, women enjoyed suchperks as proportional representation in parliament. As Mubarak’s government wasoverthrown and a new government was forming, laws that increased the rights of womenwere labeled, “Suzanne’s Laws” after Mubarak’s wife, linked to the old regime and seenas initiative’s whose true purpose was to appease the West. This strange connectionbetween women’s rights and oppressive rule is part of the reason women so often seetheir rights disappear during political transition. I would be interested to see Easterlyinclude a comparison of case studies specific to women in autocratic societies versus freesocieties. Such a discussion could have fit nicely with Easterly's exploration of thedecline of child mortality in Ethiopia, and how it led to the Western leaders overlookingthe problematic aspects of a dictator's rule (such as denying political opponents food aid).And as Whole Planet Foundation has a strong focus on empowered women changingtheir own lives through entrepreneurship, it would have made the book even morerelevant to our work (surprisingly, Easterly did not write this book only for us).The Tyranny of Experts is a valuable history lesson and a highly recommendedread. It will ask the reader to question “facts” and statistics presented by developmentinstitutions, to rethink old ideas about historical events and to value the rights of theindividual, even when an autocrat manages to accomplish some good initiatives. I oftenthink that confirmation bias causes people to seek out books that will verify what theyalready think, and that it is difficult to change anyone’s opinion. I believe this bookpresents arguments compelling enough to challenge existing beliefs.

This book brings topics Easterly already touched in his previous ones, particularly the "The Elusive Quest for Growth", a book that has certainly changed the way many understood development aid, including myself. There, he already introduced the dualism between planners and doers, and described how governments’ economic policies often kill growth. Here in “The Tyranny of Experts: economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor” we see further established the contrast between government versus market. This time, pictured as distinction between technocrats and autocrats (conscious designers) on one side and individualists (arrangers of spontaneous order) on the other.Although in a couple of points he concedes that market versus government is not really the ultimate question, as both have complementary roles, obviously, throughout the book he is standing on the field of defenders of the free play of “problem-solvers”, choosing and leading the way to the best solution of economic problems by the free concur of individuals’ interests in the market place. While he sees that benevolent technocrats may get the “conscious design” sometimes right, he also sees that more often they are dragged into committing abuses of power that are never perpetrated in the world of the free problem solvers interacting without fixed templates designed by authorities. The freedom of the market place is the right antidote for the unavoidable excesses of the autocrats “benevolent or not”, and their proxies, the technocrats. The book is rich in examples and the arguments are clear and convincing.In criticizing technocrats and autocrats, the book does a good service indeed. Noticeable though is perhaps the lack of reference to the work of the anthropologist James Scott, who in his book "Seeing like a State: How certain schemes to Improve Human condition have failed" (1998) had already presented compelling arguments about the defective offspring of the marriages between autocrats and technocrats. Scott’s and his books flow in the same stream. The anthropology of development and development agencies has more than a decade denounced the domineering strategies of rendering technical what is essentially political in the development arena. James Ferguson (mentioned a couple of times in Easterly’s book), David Mosse, Tania Murray Li, Arturo Escobar are some who made strong contributions. Undoubtedly, Easterly's book adds an invaluable economic perspective to this field of studies.However, the option to construct the narrative around individuals such as, Benjamin Seixas, Chung Ju Yung, Meinhard Brothers, Eka Tjipta Widjaja, and other not well known historical figures, whose roles come to life in the book at some inflection of development history, has tainted the characterization of dynamic growth factors. Perhaps there is an excess of “individuals” and “individualisms” in those narratives. If acceptable as a stylistic option, on the other hand this choice misrepresents the collective efforts and the confluence of ambitions and conditions that at some point prevailed to make some enterprises possible. The individual leader, or perhaps the one history has kept traces of, should count much less than the favorable sets of resources, skills, people that converged at that crucial junctions to make particular endeavor a reality.We may say that this personalization carries the same “psychological mistake" as the beliefs in "benevolent autocrats" that Easterly spent a chapter demonstrating its inappropriateness. The same way that the figure of the "benevolent autocrat" excessively praises development achievements on the personality of State leaders, the distorted idea of individualism attributes development successes to single key individuals’ initiatives. But the benevolent autocrat as well as the individual dynamic entrepreneur should count much less than the set of conditions that made a particular success story possible. Easterly convincingly explain the almost irrelevance of the benevolent autocrats, but does not do the same for the successful entrepreneurs. Why not?There should be a more realists way of telling those stories, paying the due tribute to the contributing factors, instead of making all look as random occurrence of particularly endowed individuals with above average talents and competences. Not even in history of art, where the individual artist is incontestably the maker of the admired work, it is possible to single out the geniuses, detaching individuals from the word of influences surrounding them. The history of enterprises has a collective making and more intensely social determination than the individualist approach accounts for. Nevertheless, we should admit, we humans enjoy reading stories about people; we like to link names to facts and are not so motivated to read about abstract concepts, like “social structures” and generalized formal concepts we cannot properly picture.However, there are additional problems with individualism as the engine of economic development, where we see perhaps a bad choice of word, or bad conceptual formulation, that cannot alone fully explain or justify development. There is something else. There is need to have something else. The simplification is not convincing. A factor alone can never explain the whole thing. But, not only for this reason; individualism would not justify collaboration or self restrain in relation to abuses, when the options to behave differently promise good pay offs. Individualism alone would not prevent anyone from carrying out criminal deeds; the other way round, it would drive them for the sake of rewarding themselves with surplus of power and wealth. There are other elements that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” or Hayek’s “spontaneous order” do not account for; the glue of social life that both restrains and liberates at the same time.Easterly touches the issue of rights; in fact the whole book is about rights of the people and the poor among them, and the denial of that by international agencies myopic pursuance of development without acknowledging the fundamental role rights play in that. However, the conceptual connection between individualism and rights was not explored at the necessary depth. Without a properly spelt out connection between individuals and rights, there is no distinguishable difference between individualism, selfishness and egoism.Some sense of justice, or the correlate “feeling” of fairness, has to be present in any conceptualization of rights. John Rawls’s writings are the reference for that. Fairness, and related values, puts the fulfillment of individual ambition in a different perspective. Fairness brings an additional reference to human acts; a dimension that goes beyond the mere individual desire or exclusive focus on individually motivated goals. Once the question of rights is projected on them, the justifications for acting, and the space where acting is possible, are seen at a different light. Whether honest or not, the individual grounds his or her decisions on values that exist beyond his sole individualist, or selfish for that matter, wishes and aspirations.Societies set the grammar and semantics of values that preexist the individuals and outlive them long after they are gone. That given world, with its languages and rules, provides the environment where the individual grow and learn about values. When one sets in motion processes for fulfillment of individual goals, he/she does so in an environment that he/she does not fully control, but still expects to have a number of fundamental features preserved, the ones without which attaining the goals would become impossible or meaningless. So, individualism has to live in a space that has more than what comprises the ontology of idiosyncratic individualist desires and wishes.The sense of fairness is fundamental. I accept principles and norms I grew up with because they give the rights I think I need, to have a good life; I want that to the others too, because that not only guarantees the fairness treatment I believe I am entitled to, but because I want those values to exist in a consistent manner; I want my society to have that sense because it will allow not only that I live well with my neighbors, but they also live well among themselves independently from me, and I do care about them as I do care about my family, relatives and their neighbors. We like to have assurance of permanence of values and also assurance that a common point of view can always be reached. A common logic is more important than the logic of my individual argument, because it can have larger consequences than my perspective alone.This reflection put individualism under a different light. However, it is still necessary to clarify whether legal institutions are the maternity where the sense of fairness is born or, the other way around, are themselves born because society creates them to assure stability, permanence, common use and visibility that otherwise will render all principles and norms intangible and volatile. I believe through a dialectic movement, from the society and individuals to the state and its institutions, back and forward, again and again, through time, developing historically stable forms with the contribution of the technology that becomes available, the state acquires the legal configuration that can guarantee fairness and the appropriate space where individuals can freely act according to their wishes. But the society and the individuals are aware of the need to maintain that framework alive and effective, and still limited in its reaches, in correspondence and respect to the very principle of fairness. The state should stop its acts where fairness has drawn the line, the same way individuals should also do. The problem is that the line is not always obvious for governments, international players and individuals alike.This discussion on individualism took us away from the content of the book itself. Coming back to it, a few additional points I believe needs to be mentioned. Three stories I think have been left out of Easterly accounts because, I suppose, they did not fit well the model he is trying to defend.1) The success of Soviet Union in imitating as well as innovating technologies, despite its extreme opposition to individualism, its denial of property rights, its authoritarianism, centralism and quintessential technocracy, was nevertheless remarkable. It can be argued that the model soon run out of steam and would not be able to catch up any way. Still, the advances were extraordinary compared to the third world where lower concentration of those negative factors was present. The failure of the Soviet Union might be attributed as a consequence more of the political constraints it lived of than the economic results it did not deliver. The danger of technocracy is not its presumed uselessness but the opposite; it is the possibility of success that it might bring about, and the logical convincing technical arguments that its promises will be fulfilled. The faith it is capable to amass is not trivial or easily dismissible, even when the autocrats were unmistakably non-benevolent. And, sometimes, they indeed succeed, even if temporarily.2) The exploitative nature of early capitalism, combined with colonial and imperial ruthlessness cannot be denied as essential engine of the accumulation that contributed to the conditions that made technological breakthrough possible. History is dirtier than Easterly talks. To be fair, he clearly links the backwardness in today’s poor countries to the support given to their autocratic leaders by developed country governments. But he does not mention the contrast between the assurances of individual rights happening in the home country at the same time that oppressive extraction of wealth was happening abroad. The rights guaranteed at home were systematically and often crudely denied elsewhere. That was not a marginal side effect or “collateral damage” that could not be properly prevented; it was intrinsic to the accumulation process and therefore to the progress seen in the centers of power. Those abuses bear larger responsibilities. In fact the history of exploitation could be pictured as de facto “success” stories, where the real intentions were indeed achieved; keeping the locals at the lowest level, as close as possible to slavery, but just avoiding it (in the end, slavery was not worthy its costs any more). Even the conditions the working classes were living in developed countries, and still leave in middle and low-income countries, despite all the property rights, freedom of speeches, checks and balances and anti-autocratic mechanisms, are not simply anecdotal. Today’s developed country consumers concerns about purchasing products from sweatshops abroad, are but a recent mild reversal of the enjoyment of the fruits of exploitative practices of a not so long ago past.3) The role of the state in funding research in developed countries has been left out of the picture too; that is not a matter of discussing market versus state; this is rather a mater of empirical facts. The book by Mariana Mazzucato, “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths” presents a wealth of examples on how essential state investment has been in fostering innovations in all technological fields. That has not been carried out as a matter of letting individuals to pick up topics of their own choosing; that have been practices of directing people to areas of high interests, excluding others that in spite of huge potential benefits did not have the same strategic prospects. Here the invisible hand held a stick with a carrot hanging on it; both have been used with unquestionable success. That is not the “invisible hand” of individualist choices riding the racing horses of development, but rather the visible hand of the technocrats pointing at where the rewards are.In conclusion, the effort of the author in reminding the core importance of rights for the poor in development processes is fully commendable and we can say his point has been well made. What has been left to be solved though, on the theoretical ground, is the "partnership" between individualism and rights, and on the pragmatic ground, are the institutions and processes that should make rights and entitlements real. Furthermore, without nation states, entities that Easterly often seems to consider a distraction on the way of understanding the true determinants of development, where will institutions supporting the rights of the poor be erected? What will be the institutional guarantor of such rights? How could rights have existence detached from the political setting that is needed to create them? Easterly did not fully address these questions. Maybe, he will, in his next book.Still to be answered is also the question on how today’s State-nations can relinquish “conscious design” when the economic power given to them by taxes have to be put to good use. What would be the alternative? Governing without plans, policies, programs and budgets? Is that possible? If the reflection goes in that direction we may as well ask whether there is really an incompatibility between “conscious design” and development. Is that just a matter of fine-tuning Sates’ interventions? If so, how to find out where enough is enough? Inspired in Hayek, he argues that the “spontaneous order” can also have the same role in the political arena as it has in the market place, leading to the best results. However, as politics must be the realm of conscious debates and coordinated decisions, there should not be place for “invisible hands”; any calculation of “private vs. public returns” will be highly speculative, artificial and politically motivated; markets can be left to themselves, politics, by definition, cannot. But that is a political philosophy topic that would need many more pages to disentangle. His next book may also bring answers to these questions.In spite of these, this is a necessary and a must read book.

This book proves that development needs to promote poor’s human rights, rather than preserve the status quo of the current development aid agencies.

Well put together

Un autre excellent ouvrage sur l'économie du développement de William Easterly! Ici trois grandes questions sont abordées: le rôle de l'histoire (par rapport à une vision uniforme des pays en développement), le rôle de la planification (face aux individus) et la dimension d'ordre spontanée à travers la garantie des droits, à travers, notamment, une opposition entre Hayek et Myrdal... Tout est expliqué dès les 50 premières pages; le reste présente des exemples concrets et pertinents. L'ouvrage permet de prendre du recul par rapport à des développement classiques en économie de l'environnement. Il s'inscrit assez largement dans la veine du dernier ouvrage d'Acemoglu et Robinson... Une très seine lecture pour prendre de la hauteur.

Entwicklung erfolgte historisch stets aus eigenen internen Antriebskräften. Diese sind kulturell, soziologisch und psychologisch bedingt, abgesehen von den klimatischen und geopolitischen Bedingungen. Easterly erklärt überzeugend, dass die seit Jahrzehnten vorherrschende Expertenbesserwisserei und -arroganz (man denkt unwillkürlich auch an die Grünen) viel Schaden angerichtet hat. Ein lesenswertes Buch für alle die noch daran glauben, dass Entwicklungsländer auch ohne die sogenannten Experten auf die Beine kommen können.

Excellently argued citicism of the aid industry. In any case, private aid is always better than public or even politically motivated NGOs.