Commerce, Not Conquest | Interview: William Easterly

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.6 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Economist William Easterly makes his debut on The Remnant to talk with middle-aged nobody Jonah Goldberg about free trade, USAID, human agency, colonialism, and Chinese liberalization. Shownotes:—Easterly’s website—Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest—Easterly’s recent paper touching on Lee Kuan Yew—Excerpts from Edmund Burke’s speech on India—Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of Jonah’s G-File newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.
0:18.0	Can you digger? Can I please have your attention? Daniel Diggins.
0:27.5	Greetings your listeners.
0:28.6	This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast.
0:30.4	Brunched you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.
0:33.0	Today we have a guest I wanted to get on here for a very long time.
0:36.4	He's one of the most interesting
0:37.7	economists and intellectuals out there. William Easterly is a professor emeritus of economics
0:43.2	at New York University and co-director emeritus of the NYU Development Research Institute.
0:49.5	He's the author of several books, including The Tyranny of experts and the white man's burden.
0:55.5	And he's published a zillion of peer-reviewed academic articles and written op-eds and all the usual fancy places.
1:03.5	Professor Easterly, thanks for coming on the remit.
1:05.8	Pleasure to be here.
1:07.3	Oh, I should say, you have a new book out called Violent Saviors.
1:12.2	What's your book about?
1:13.5	Jonah, let me start with where the book came from.
1:17.0	I've been observing as a development economist for many years that there's this concept of benevolent autocrats, benevolent dictators,
1:24.9	in which if a dictator happens to have a lot of economic growth on his watch, he's
1:30.2	presumed to be benevolent.
1:31.3	So somebody like Melisinawe, the dictator of Ethiopia from the 90s through 2012, did have
1:38.6	high economic growth in Ethiopia, and it's presumed to be a benevolent guy and got praised
1:43.2	from the likes of Bill Gates and Susan Rice.
	...

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