Jessica Mack interviewed William Easterly about women and international aid:
The battle in American history, which is also a story of development – development is not just about Africa – has been the battle to correct the double standard. Men are not superior to women; white people don’t have one set of rights, and black people another. We white males would prefer to forget that this was very recent in our own society, and this is why we’re so happy to transfer our gaze to some far away society that has some more extreme problem. Confronting that history honestly makes us realize that this is the fight: to keep eroding, eroding, and eroding that double standard.
We’re still a long way from equal rights for women in the US. Recognition of that also helps us appreciate that when we talk about women’s rights in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we come in with our own skeletons in the closet. That should make should make us more aware of how hard these problems are to make progress on and we should not paper them over with all these development buzzwords, which is unfortunately what’s happening.
The Dish 