William Easterly on the Tyranny of Experts

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2014

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

William Easterly of New York University and author of The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his book. Easterly argues that poverty endures in many poor countries because of a lack of economic and political freedom for its poorest members. He argues that the aid process and the role experts play in that process reinforces the oppression of the poor. Other topics discussed include data-oriented solutions, autocracy vs. democracy, and Easterly's perspective on development from Bill Gates and recent EconTalk guest Jeffery Sachs.

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,
0:07.8	of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, or you can subscribe,
0:14.4	comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.6	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:31.9	Today is May 19, 2014, and my guest is William Easterly of New York University. His latest book is
0:39.0	The Tyranny of Experts, Economist, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. And that book
0:45.2	is the subject of today's conversation. Bill, welcome back to Econ Talk. Thanks, Russ. Good to be here.
0:51.2	What do you mean by the tyranny of experts? Well, it's an unintentional tyranny that results when
0:59.0	experts think the poverty is a purely technical solution, and they can ignore whether the rights of
1:05.9	the poor or the respected are not. So in practice, they accept the status quo in which the
1:11.5	rights of the poor are not respected. And what the experts wind up doing is sort of being in charge
1:19.2	in an unintentional collusion with the autocrats that are the status quo in the poor countries that
1:25.7	they are operating. The experts and the autocrats that are running development from the top down,
1:33.2	and that is neither morally desirable, nor does it work.
1:38.0	Now you talk about the rights of the poor, not being respected by experts.
1:43.5	Isn't it more than that? Isn't it the behavior of the poor sometimes? Just respect generally
1:48.8	that's missing? Yeah, there is a more fundamental paternalism and condescension towards the poor.
1:55.6	This inability to believe that the poor people are really capable of developing themselves.
2:05.1	So development is thought of something that we, the experts, have to do too, and for them,
2:11.7	because we really don't believe they can do it themselves. But it's this kind of double standard
2:16.0	in that we only think about our own history of how we developed. We don't think about it that way.
	...

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