Following our talk featuring Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, we will be hosting fellow developmental economist and his main critic Prof. William Easterly.
William Easterly's Bio:
William Easterly is an American economist, specializing in economic growth and foreign aid. He is a Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC. Easterly is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics.
Easterly maintains a blog called "Aid Watch"where he posts regularly about aid related issues and has often written in the press to respond to critics such as Jeff Sachs.
He is also the author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth : Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics." and "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good."
--
Easterly on Sachs:
Like Sachs, I also salute the efforts of natural scientists to come up with many such effective goods. Unlike Sachs, however, I believe that fixing the economics of aid is necessary for the goods to reach the poor. Although aid can do much good in this way, I also disagree with Sachs that outside aid and foreign experts can achieve the end of poverty. That will happen only
by the efforts of the people of the poor nations themselves, not by a 21st century version of the White Man’s Burden.
To Professor Sachs, African poverty is just a technical problem that "the world's leading practitioners" can solve (as described in the thousands of pages produced by Sachs's UN Millennium Project) if only these experts are given enough money for their "proven strategies." This reveals a remarkable naiveté about the roots of poverty. Poverty in Africa is the outcome of much deeper factors such as political elites who seek mainly to protect their own position, dysfunctional institutions like corruption and lack of property rights, and a long history of exploitation and meddling from abroad (the slave trade, colonial depredations, the creation of artificial states, military interventions). It takes breathtaking hubris to assert that this mess can be fixed for the tidy sum of $75 billion. A similar hubris leads to amnesia concerning the many previous generations of technical experts that have ineffectively tried Sachs's "proven strategies" to end African poverty.
Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or foreign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by homegrown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of democracy and free markets.