Bill Easterly explores the connection between individual rights and economic growth:
I think when you are doing research, you are confronted with a body of evidence where there are some questions where the honest answer is just, "I don't know." … How does that [uncertainty in top-down plans] point to individual rights? If the experts at the top don't know how to design the policy, you want a system that can handle that. You can handle that with a system in which everyone at the bottom has the right to solve their own problems, with their own knowledge.
People do know a lot about their own problems at their own level. They can give you feedback on how you're doing, if you are trying to solve their problems from the top, from government. In a democracy, you give feedback on how well, or how badly, the government is doing. So individual rights is also a way to mobilize all the knowledge in society that we need to make the economy work. It's the individual that has the particular knowledge so that they know how to run their factory, to employ people, to be a worker themselves, to start new businesses.
The Dish 
