Showing results by author "William Easterly" in All Categories

In The Tyranny of Experts, renowned economist William Easterly examines our failing efforts to fight global poverty, and argues that the "expert approved" top-down approach to development has not only made little lasting progress, but has proven a convenient rationale for decades of human rights violations perpetrated by colonialists, postcolonial dictators, and US and UK foreign policymakers seeking autocratic allies. Easterly demonstrates how our traditional antipoverty tactics have trampled the freedom of the poor and suppressed a vital debate about alternative approaches....

Economic development is not really development without consent. For centuries, the developed Western world has exploited the less-developed 'Rest' in the name of progress, conquering the Americas, driving the Atlantic slave trade, and colonizing Africa and Asia. Tracing the economic ideas underpinning the long debate between conquest and commerce, Easterly shows how it is the surge in global trade that has given agency to billions of people for the first time.