The Tyranny of Experts

Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

By: William Easterly

Narrated by: Chris Ciulla

In this "bracingly iconoclastic” book (New York Times Book Review), a renowned economics scholar breaks down the fight to end global poverty and the rights that poor individuals have had taken away for generations.

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. Demonstrating how our traditional antipoverty tactics have both trampled the freedom of the world's poor and suppressed a vital debate about alternative approaches to solving poverty, Easterly presents a devastating critique of the blighted record of authoritarian development. In this masterful work, Easterly reveals the fundamental errors inherent in our traditional approach and offers new principles for Western agencies and developing countries alike: principles that, because they are predicated on respect for the rights of poor people, have the power to end global poverty once and for all.

Making “Expert” a Bad Word

As a criticism of the arrogance, overreach, and ineffectiveness of the World Bank, IMF, and other development donors, this book is both damning and accurate. As almost every development practitioner knows, decisions made thousands of miles away in a conference room filled with a half dozen economists and MBA‘s at a whiteboard are more often than not doomed to failure. These are the experts whom Easterly seeks to excoriate, his former colleagues.

But he draws his target area -the category of experts and technocrats- too broadly. I have encountered and worked with hundreds of real experts in my 40 year development career: rice farmers, fruit dehydrators, dairymen, grain traders, lawyers, banker‘s, investors, poultry processors, university administrators, bovine embryo transplant experts, etc. The list goes on and on.

More often than not, these real experts have no part in or fealty for the bad expert behavior that Easterly outlines. They believe that the overpaid, highly-educated elites in Washington, Strasbourg, Rome, or Geneva should stop exercising control from thousands of miles away, and let them attempt to work with local partners at solving local problems.

If he had chosen a different title for this book, perhaps “the tyranny of of World Bank development economists“ I would have no quibble with him. Most of his criticisms hit the bullseye.

I also learned quite a lot about the early history of development. Overall, this is a very good listen. I wish Easterly had chosen someone more interesting to bring his material to life. The reader on this one had a very annoying, cadence and tone.

don't waste your money

As a detailed history of the evolution of the modern development theory, this book fits the bill, though rather drily. As anything else, it's terrible. A large chunk of the first portion of the book is centered on a debate that should have happened but didn't, presuming that things would be different if it had. The biggest failing of the author is that he studiously avoids realizing that proponents of authoritarian imperial economic development were arguing in bad faith. They are simply justifying taking more power for themselves, with no concern for whether they're plans work as argued. The bulk of the book is thus irrelevant because it accepts in good faith a claim that is clearly made in bad faith.

The narration is also terrible, comparable to a text to speech program, albeit one of the better ones. the cadence is odd and the inflection random, making this impossible to listen to for more than a few minutes at a time. granted, some of the awkwardness is due to the structure of the book, which is more like a fleshed out outline rather than a narrative, but the narrator does nothing to blunt that effect.