Brian Doherty praises William Easterly’s Tyranny of Experts for how it tackles the follies of the international development industry:
Easterly is particularly sharp on the looseness of much of the “data” that development experts rely on. He mocks Bill Gates, the Uncle Pennybags of modern development econ, for crowing about a five-year improvement in Ethiopian child mortality rates. Easterly convincingly describes a confusing data landscape, marred by lack of well-kept vital records in shoddy states, and wildly varying estimates from different independent sources doing the best they can with the bad source material they have to deal with. In fact, we have no way to get an accurate picture about infant and child death in the Third World. Our macro data on the economies of the poorer parts of the world are too unreliable and inconsistent to use as much of a measure of anything.
But he sees flaws with the book:
[F]or a book trying to make the case that poor, autocratic governments harm their citizens’ rights with the connivance of western development experts, Tyranny of Experts lacks sufficient specifics of how and why that is so, or enough vivid stories demonstrating the specific human costs of development hubris. It’s almost as if Easterly thinks his claims are so obviously true that he doesn’t have to get bogged down in the details of proving them.
The Economist is not so sure about Easterly’s big-picture ideas:
Mr Easterly is at his trenchant best when demolishing various bits of received wisdom about development, whether about the role of strong leaders or the idea that policymakers actually know how to choose the right policies. Often they do not; nor do economists. This makes it harder to share his confidence that securing individual rights will do the trick. Rights clearly matter, but there is also a lot of evidence that individuals, like policymakers, do not make efficient use of all the information available. Instead they often rely on quick, flawed rules of thumb to guide their decisions. Securing rights may be necessary, but it is unlikely to be sufficient.
Mr Easterly claims that the “difference between individualist and collectivist values” is one of the great divides that explains why Western Europe prospered in the early modern age as the rest of the old world fell behind. True, Westerners today stress things like self-reliance, where East Asians might value group loyalty. Yet history surely matters here.
Eric Posner came to similar conclusions in a review he wrote last month:
Which rights should we advocate? How should we insist that they be implemented? What should we do to governments that refuse to take our advice? I suspect that if he gave these questions some thought, he would realize that any serious effort to compel or bribe poor countries to recognize rights would look like the development activities that he criticizes. Indeed, his bête noir, the World Bank, famously tried to implement “rule of law” projects that were supposed to enhance rights. These projects failed for all the reasons that all the other development projects failed.
In March, the Dish highlighted an excerpt from Easterly’s book.
The Dish 