Review of 'The Tyranny of Experts' by William Easterly

William Easterly, a NYU Economist, is a major player in development economics and perhaps the biggest critics to how development agencies squander aid and ignore the rights of the poor. The subheading of his newest book, The Tyranny of Experts - Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, indicates the particular interest his book deals with; The pervasiveness of the idea that a Benevolent Dictator could put their populations' rights and freedoms on hold in order for economic growth and prosperity to arise.

He praises the Enlightenment and its protection of individual rights, a statement that initially seems unrelated to his field ("what have rights got to do with feeding my starving family?", implicitly attacking critics that play such a position: "What good is freedom of speech, if you're starving?").
He then consistantly shows how Authoritarian approaches that ignore rights are counter-productive in producing development. How the authoritarian top-down view lost in the West, but remained dominant in Development Agencies (=World Bank, USAID, DFID), effectively preventing the Rest from growing richer.

He mentions outrageous examples that superficially seem well-intended (Gates Foundation or the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative), but result in horrendous persecution of poor people. Human Rights Watch showed how donor-funded food relief was used to blackmail opposition. International Development Agencies supporting a regime that jailed opponents and shot demonstrators. The Ethiopian government abused any imaginable right on part of their poorest by forcingly displace them, took villagers' land and leased to foreign investors. Tony Blair praised the alleged Ethiopian Government's rapid reduction of child mortality. Bill Gates mourned the death of Ethiopia's dictator Meles Zenawi, saying it "was a great loss for Ethiopia". Right. Not very benevolent.

I want to point out three topics that particularly spawned my interest: The Blank Slate, Spontaneous Solutions and the Probability Confusion.

Blank Slate.

The Blank Slate, Easterly describes, is the

mindset [that] tends to ignore history and to see each poor society as infinately malleable for the development expert to apply his technical solutions. The alternative would be to learn from history why each poor society is poor, to learn from history why other societies became rich, and to draw lessons accordingly for how to escape poverty.

The Blank Slate is the pervasive attitude in the field of Development to see poor countries as one unit, regardless of differences between them. It fosters the potential to give "One-Size-Fits-All" solutions that disregard history and disregard whatever circumstances lead to the current situation. It's the belief that one can simply erase anything previously occured and start over, forming societies or human beings into whatever you're currently trying to achieve.

Easterly says:

Blank Slate thinking thus opened the door for development experts to reject the utility of the West's history of individual rights and development as a precedent. If the Rest had nothing to learn from its own history, it also had nothing to learn from the West's history. 

Essentially, the Blank Slate, is the excuse development "Experts" can use for disregarding History. For disregarding the reasons for this:

Honestly, it's a very useful concept, applicable to many more areas than Easterly believed, I think.

Concious Directions vs Spontaneous Solution. 

Roughly translated into "Top-Down versus Bottom-Up" approaches. Initially a Hayekian point about dispursed knowledge, Easterly adds reasoning over innovations. Since Innovation means doing things differently, in a way previously unknown or undiscovered, you can't plan innovation as you simply don't know what the results of doing things differently (innovating) will be - so you can't plan for certain results to happen. There's no top-down planning involved in discovering anti-biotics, inventing steam-engines or cellphones.

The point is the same as that made repeatedly throughout this book. The top-down leaders and experts in technology do not have enough knowledge or incentives to get it right for the reality of what is happening at the bottom. 

He goes on, describing how ideas multiply exponentially, and how technological development feeds on itself into a snowball effect consisting of a) previous innovations/non-rivalrous ideas and b) population. Also, the amount of technology had in year 1500 is found to be a pretty good determinant of how much technology that area has today:

We confirmed that technology in 1500 predicts technology (and thus per capita income) today. In fact, 78% of the income difference today between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa can be explained by technology that was already in place by 1500. [...] So we find that a very simple theory of bottom-up innovation can explain many of the big facts about tehcnology around the world today. 

Here, Easterly also draws on Joel Mokyr's work on the British Industrial Revolution: "Intellectual innovation could only occur in the kind of tolerant societies in which sometimes outrageous ideas proposed by highly eccentric men would not entail a violent response against 'heresy'".

Argument simplified:
- Innovation fuels income/wealth
- Individuals with unalianable rights make innovation happen
= Top-Down approach to innovation and lack of individual rights are bad ideas if you're looking for higher incomes.

Probability Confusion.

This area deals with the _ONE_ objection I had while reading; What about the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) and their miraculous growth over the last few decades? They were all run by "Benevolent Autocrats". The very existence of these countries seem to throw Easterly's great contribution out the window.

No, he says. We seem to think that autocrats create growth because of a psychological mistake where we confuse two opposite probabilities.

In his outstanding Chapter Thirteen "Leaders: How We Are Seduced by Benevolent Autocrats" he deals with that question as well as with the psychological biases that give credit to leaders while underlying causes might've been more obscure. He concludes:

It is because growth miracles are rare that the true statement 'most growth miracles are autocrats' is so very different from the false statement 'most autocrats are growth miracles'. This same psychological mistake contributes to stereotyping of certain unpopular minority groups. It could be true that 'most terrorists are Muslims', but it is definately not true that 'most Muslims are terrorists'. Prison statistics could indicate that 'most violent felons are black', but it is definately not true that 'most blacks are violent felons'. Racism has many toxic causes, but one of them is just the racists' incompetence at probability. The same incompetence makes us believe autocrats produce high growth."

The above passage is surely what most affected me in his 350-page masterpiece. He also explains the "Myth of the Hot Hand", a phenomenon in basket where you'd want to pass the ball to a player who has scored a lot, believing he'll score again. Over large series of probabilities, it simple isn't true. But if you point your finger at a few selected examples, then sure you could find players scoring over and over - just like you can find autocrats being in power while a country experienced miracolous growth.

His explanation for China, South Korea or Taiwan?
- Levels produce levels, changes produce changes. It's not the level of freedom that produces a certain growth miracle. It's the change in freedom that creates growth. China had massive changes in economic freedom following the reforms in late 1970s. Economic growth is about a percentage change in development, he says. Not about the absolute level of development. This would explain the rapid success of the tigers, although I realize the debate is far from settled just from this. Nevertheless, an amazing insight.

He finishes the books as splendidly as he started it, summing up its main points. Development is a bottom-up thing. Ignore individual rights in order to plan development is a double-failure. Not to mention that freedom is a value in and of itself. Beyond that, there are more fascinating chapters: his examination of development in China, Africa and Colombia; his local history of the Greene neighbourhood in New York, accidently binding some New York history into it. He describes the value of institutions by comparing the Maghrib traders in the Mediterranean to the Genoese. He compares the debates that never happend between Nobel Laureates Gunnar Myrdal and Friedrich Hayek as well as tracing the origin of development experts.

This is simply an amazing book.

The global double standard of rights for the rich and not for the poor is very much alive in the technocratic worldview of development. But this, too, could be a casualty of the Rise of the Rest and the spread of freedom. The disrespect for poor people shown by agencies such as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation, with their stereotypes of wise technocrats from the West and helpless victims from the Rest, may become increasingly untenable. Development may have to give up its authoritarian mind-set to survive.