This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 30th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What are the alternatives to foreign aid?

What role does economic freedom play in advancing the lot of the very poor?

Matt Warner is president of the Atlas Network, he's editor of a new volume, Poverty and Freedom,

case studies on global economic development, we spoke last week.

The last time we spoke, we talked about the outsider's dilemma, the difficulty of appreciating

the needs, desires, and how incentives work within a lot of

impoverished areas around the globe. And now you've produced this book,

Poverty and Freedom, Case Studies on Global Economic Development.

What emerges here that you think is particularly useful for people who really care about trying to improve the lot of the very poor

on planet Earth and also appreciate this outsider's dilemma.

Well, this book sets out a fairly coherent alternative to foreign aid as a philanthropic effort to reduce poverty around the world.

And there are plenty of diverse voices who are looking or calling for alternatives to foreign aid or significant reforms for foreign aid.

And what this book does is it takes a lot of the diverse voices from center left to center right to what have you and

looks at where there is emerging consensus around how to approach combining local knowledge,

which is super important, expanding individual choice for people, and relying less on governments

and politics as the way for us to be working on making the world a better place.

So in these case studies, what do we learn?

I know we've talked about some of these already because I know you were working on this book when the last time we spoke but what are some case studies that that really make the case that a lot of foreign aid is simply not productive.

Yeah, so these there's 13 case studies in the book and each of them represents an alternative to foreign aid, which is they represent local think tanks

who have local knowledge, their own vision for institutional change.

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