William Easterly’s eagerly awaited The Tyranny of Experts is several things: It is an intellectual history of development economics. It is a sweeping discussion of why some institutions work while others do not. It is a critique of the philosophical assumptions of aid-and-development officials who view development as a non-ideological and scientific discipline that is done by experts and to an undifferentiated and homogeneous lump of blood and flesh called “the poor.” It is intellectual comfort food for people (like me) who are skeptical of the idea that the only things standing between us and a world free of poverty are insufficient funding and political will. Finally, it is a call for humanitarians and members of “the development community” to recognize their own limitations and take the rights and capabilities of the world’s poor as seriously as they take their own.

Easterly documents and discusses three major errors in thinking about development:

  • thinking of societies as social “blank slates” on which new stories can be written and with histories that can be safely ignored
  • emphasizing “the well-being of nations” rather than the well-being of individuals
  • privileging “conscious design” rather than “spontaneous solutions”

In contrast to development-as-social-engineering, he emphasizes the importance of history and the context, individual rights, and problem-solving characteristics of decentralized orders. He does this by exploring the intellectual history of development economics, and he applies his insights to studies of Latin America, Africa, and the Far East.

Condemning the man of system / In chapters that remind me of Thomas Leonard’s research on economists in the eugenics movement, Easterly lays bare the sometimes-explicit racism of western immigration policies (the Chinese Exclusion Act, for example) and development initiatives. In this view, development is not something that happens in a world rich with nuance and cultural context. It is something that is done to poor (and perhaps inferior) people by technocrat-advised and benevolent autocrats, against the poor’s will but for their ultimate good.

Or so it might seem. The rights and agency of the poor were swept aside in the name of fulfilling what Thomas Sowell might call “The Vision of the Anointed”—a vision of a good society, though why it is good we do not know—that would emerge from the plans of technocrats backed by the force of autocrats. The planners sometimes sound like villains out of Atlas Shrugged. Consider, for example, this passage from Wu Ding-chang’s lecture “International Economic Cooperation in China”: “With such a Commission working on a comprehensive, scientifically formulated, progressive and practical plan of economic development, public support and ultimate success are assured.”

“The technocratic illusion” that poor countries lack the expertise and political will necessary for development stands at odds with what Easterly identifies as “the real cause of poverty: the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights.” Those rights, Easterly emphasizes, are important as “moral ends in themselves.” They are not inconvenient “barriers” to be trampled and discarded in the pursuit of technocrats’ goals. He puts it as follows: “The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights.” Through their emphasis on government planning as a solution to dire poverty, technocrats (perhaps unwittingly) legitimize violations of poor people’s rights by making them secondary to the planners’ goals. Easterly takes particular issue with the philosophical underpinnings of technocratic solutions. “Development” in this view is “a technical question with technical solutions,” where it is assumed that rights are of secondary importance because those being developed prefer a full belly to legal, political, and financial autonomy.

At its core, The Tyranny of Experts is a condemnation of the vision Adam Smith associated with “the man of system” and what Friedrich Hayek called “the fatal conceit.” In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith gets to the heart of the same issue Easterly addresses:

The man of system … is apt to be very wise [to] his own conceit; and is often so enamoured [sic] with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse [sic] to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Easterly uses different language and does not (to my recollection) use this quote explicitly, but he traces the man of (development) system’s intellectual genealogy and documents some of his adventures in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He explores a theme that has permeated Christopher Coyne’s work on military intervention (his 2007 book After War) and humanitarian intervention (his 2013 book Doing Bad by Doing Good, in which he explicitly criticizes “the man of humanitarian system”). Easterly’s discussion is a fine complement to Coyne’s work, which is in turn a fine complement to Easterly’s earlier books The Elusive Quest for Growth (2003) and The White Man’s Burden (2006).

Economics as such is a value-free endeavor. It tells us what the effects of a particular action or policy might be, but it can’t tell us which actions are right and which actions are wrong. Easterly’s invocation of the rights of the poor is particularly important as “non-ideological, evidence-based” solutions to the problems of poverty nonetheless rely on an implicit moral framework. Easterly forces us to reckon with this by noting that rights violations and moral outrages happening under the auspices of “development” and that would be unthinkable in, say, Ohio can go uninvestigated and unpunished in poor countries.

If we should do anything, we should remove restrictions on mobility for goods, labor, and capital so that people can cast their nets in the best waters.

The book is not without its faults, but they are very minor. I was surprised that Easterly referred to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson as “pioneers in reintroducing historical research into economics, with the aim of explaining economic development.” I think Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson themselves would admit that they are standing on the shoulders of giants like Douglass North and others who have been using “historical research … with the aim of explaining economic development” for a long time. This is a nit-picky matter of interpretation, though, and not a serious problem with the overall argument. Perhaps a better way to put it would be to credit Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson with making the rest of the economics profession aware of a rich research tradition.

About three-quarters of the way through the book, Easterly discusses James Watt’s steam engine and the role of patents in fostering innovation. Easterly notes that the “conventional wisdom,” which says that “patents are the main or only way the West solved the inadequate incentives for invention problem,” is incorrect because short-run monopoly profits can stimulate innovation. Easterly’s discussion here would have benefited from an engagement with Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s argument that intellectual property rights “are an unnecessary evil” that “[do] not increase either innovation or creation.” As it stands, Boldrin and Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly is uncited in The Tyranny of Experts, which is unfortunate because of the role of debates about intellectual property law in international trade agreements. These are not crippling weaknesses and they do not harm his central argument; if anything, they can be cleared up with a few words in a second edition.

You’ve probably heard the proverb, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” The man of system’s fatal conceit is this: he truly believes the problem facing poor people is that they don’t know how to fish, and this can only be remedied by his intervention. As the work of Elinor Ostrom and so many others has shown, however, people in poor countries do know how to fish, and in light of their knowledge about what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place,” they almost certainly know better than we do. As Easterly documents, the best thing we can do for the world’s poor isn’t to teach them how to fish because they probably already know how to do that. If we should do anything, we should remove restrictions on mobility for goods, labor, and capital so that people can search for and find the best waters in which to cast their nets.

We flatter ourselves when we think we can intervene advantageously in others’ lives. It wouldn’t be so tragic if real, flesh-and-blood people weren’t the ones paying the price for our arrogance.