This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 7, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Technocratic approach to ending global poverty favored by development experts often strengthens

authoritarian governments and neglects or actively undermines the

preferences of poor people.

William Easterley's new book, The Tyranny of Experts, explores these themes. We spoke yesterday.

You call yourself a recovering expert. What does that mean?

Well, it means that I used to belong myself to the tyranny of experts that I believe that development was something that we, the experts, technical experts, economist experts,

was something we did to them the poor people instead of something development

that was development is really about poor people doing things for themselves about

seizing their own rights and solving their own problems through their own enjoyment of greater

economic and political rights.

So you've described a lot of what development aid does is a little more than social engineering packages that are developed

by agencies public and private that also contract with governments and you say that that just

really misunderstands what poor people want and need.

Yeah the mindset is really the problem here.

It's this very paternalistic mindset that claims to know what poor people need better than they

know themselves, rather than letting them freely choose

themselves among different technical solutions that solve their problems which

they are already doing. You know, poor mothers already go out and find antibiotics for their children.

This mentality that poor people should be in charge of their own lives, that they should have the rights to run their own lives.

That's fundamentally antithetical to the expert mindset.

...