William Easterly on Benevolent Autocrats and Growth

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🗓️ 30 May 2011

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

William Easterly of New York University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the oft-heard claim that poor countries led by autocrats grow faster than poor countries that are democratic. Drawing on a recent paper, "Benevolent Autocrats," Easterly argues that while some autocracies do indeed grow very quickly, a much greater number do not. Yet, the idea that the messiness of democracy is inferior to a dictatorship remains seductive. Easterly gives a number of arguments for the perennial appeal of autocracy as a growth strategy. The conversation closes with a discussion of the limitations of our knowledge about growth and where that leaves policymakers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is May 13th, 2011, and my guest is William Easterly of New York
0:43.9	University. Bill, welcome back to Econ Talk. Hey Russ. Our topic for today is a recent paper,
0:50.0	very provocative paper you've written called Benevolent Autocrats. What is a Benevolent
0:57.3	Autocrat? And what does it have to do with economic growth? Benevolent Autocrat is an
1:02.9	80-liter and a non-democratic society that gets the credit for high economic growth. So I'm
1:11.5	thinking like Lee Kwan-Yu who gets the credit for Singapore, Miracle, or Park Chun-Hee who gets
1:18.5	the credit for South Korea's high growth and the Korean Miracle. And there's China? Yeah, now
1:25.9	everyone's favorite example. There's so many. Even to the extent that people are starting to
1:32.0	talk about a Beijing consensus replacing the Washington consensus in which authoritarian high
1:38.9	growth would be the model to follow. The Washington consensus was the idea that property rights,
1:46.8	rule of law, open markets, yield growth. And now we have another view that says that
1:53.2	Autocrats yield growth. I guess it would be the polite way to say it. Right. Autocrats,
1:57.2	advice by experts, yield growth. Yeah. Well, your paper opens with a rather remarkable quote,
2:03.3	which I'm afraid I've seen before, but it bears repeating a quote from New York Times
2:08.6	columnist Thomas Friedman saying, one party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,
2:15.5	but when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people as China is today,
2:20.5	it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but
2:25.8	critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
	...

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