Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Can the promise of economic progress ever justify conquest, coercion, and control over other people’s lives? Economist William Easterly joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to argue no--and to rethink what "development" really means in theory, in history, and in our politics today. Drawing on his new book, Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest, Easterly explores how colonial powers and later regimes like the Soviet Union claimed to increase people's material well-being while stripping them of freedom, dignity, and any say in their own fate. Russ and Easterly dig into the idea of agency--the ability of people to choose for themselves--through the lens of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Frederick Douglass, and modern debates over foreign aid, autocrats, and technocratic "solutions" imposed from afar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is November 11th, 2025, And my guest is economist and author William Easterly.
0:43.0	He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University. His latest book is
0:48.7	Violent Saviors, The West's Conquest of the Rest, which is the subject of today's conversation.
0:57.4	This is Bill's fourth appearance on the program.
1:00.2	He was last year in June of 2014, very long time ago, talking about the tyranny of experts.
1:07.2	Bill, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:09.6	Thank you, Russ.
1:10.4	Pleasure to be here.
1:11.6	The central idea of this book is captured in its title.
1:15.1	It's a fantastic title, a title that seems like an oxymoron.
1:20.3	Violent Saviors.
1:21.6	Usually think of saviors as being sort of peaceful and helpful and violent people
1:25.9	are people you want to stay away from.
1:27.7	Why did you call your book that?
1:29.0	And how does that capture what's going on in the book?
1:32.3	Yeah, well, one of the big ideas of the book is how much Western conquest of the rest, colonialism in general, was justified by the Western mission to bring development to the rest of the world.
1:48.1	So the conquest of the Americas of Africa, of Asia was justified saying, you know, we're bringing development to these guys, so they're going to be better off.
	...

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