State v. the Poor

One of the burdens of William Easterly’s The Tyranny of Experts is that the state is one of the great obstacles to development. 

As Howard French summarizes the argument in the NYTBR, “Easterly’s stories unfailingly reinforce a select number of crucial themes, the boldest being that the people of the so-called underdeveloped world have been systematically betrayed by the technocrats in charge of the global development agenda. ‘The technocratic approach ignores what this book will establish as the real cause of poverty — the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights.’” 

Easterly also criticizes development programs for giving too little attention to history and culture: “He offers the example of the World Bank, in 1949, whipping up a 950-page development plan for Colombia in less than a year, in which recommendations weren’t specific to that country. These advisers also ignore evidence saying the greatest benefits to a society come from the spontaneous, uncoordinated actions of mostly small actors whose talents are allowed to flourish, as opposed to top-down initiatives involving the state or outside donors.”

Though laying blame on tyrants and on development technocrats, he also “blames much of the failure of development as a Western movement, and a great deal of misery in Africa specifically on the twin legacies of imperialism and racism. He brandishes this claim of racism liberally but not gratuitously; his point being that paternalism and a belief in the incapacity of others is an unexamined foundation of development ideology. ‘Locating the formative years of development between 1919 and 1949 highlights a critical point,’ Easterly writes: ‘Development ideas took shape before there was even the most minimal respect in the West for the rights of individuals in the Rest.’”