I was recommended to read The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by economics professor William Easterly.
Easterly tells a story familiar to the rebels that don't like being dictated to by the educated elite. The way of the world is for the best and the brightest to decide what is good for us, and then implement it, for our own good, of course.
Easterly approaches the issue with a review of development economics, the notion that experts and administrators know how to bring the backward nations of the world into the modern age with targeted plans formulated and executed by a central government advised by international experts.
On Easterly's telling, this all began a century ago at the intersection of economics and colonialism. The western colonial governments were starting to get a bit uncomfortable with the western domination of the rest of the world. How did democracy and self government mesh with the colonial domination of Africa and Asia? The answer was a clever one.
The backward people governed by the western colonialists were really too backward to be able to govern themselves and come up with ideas and plans for their own development, so the answer was for autocratic governments, colonial or post-colonial, to execute on economic development plans developed by European experts, the chaps who knew what they were doing. Politics was the answer.
It actually makes a lot of sense. If you are the ruling class the last thing you can countenance is to get up and abandon the levers of political power, and say to yourself, OK, our rule is unjust and we should just get the heck out of here. Instead what you do is elide the truth of your unjust rule, and perform a misdirection play. You say to yourself and to the world that, well, these backward people aren't really interested in political rights. So the best thing to do for them is to implement a targeted plan of economic development created and executed by us, the knowledgeable ones.
This is smarter than you might think. It appeals to the existing colonialists, and it appeals to any budding local nationalist revolutionary cadres. It flatters liberal reformers and it sidesteps the whole question of political legitimacy. Thus, between the world wars, there was a big effort to come up with a development plan for China, in which both the Rockefeller Foundation and Sun Yat-sen/Chiang Kai-Shek supporters collaborated. It conveniently dropped the question in which ordinary Chinese people were intensely interested, of western enclaves in China where western law superseded Chinese law.
Or in Africa, the colonialists came up with development plans after World War II to benefit "the natives" without really tackling the who-whom question of whether the western colonialists should be the ones to dictate such matters.
Of course, there were people that questioned the technocratic development model, and Easterly frames this opposition in the contrast between the two winners of the 1974 Nobel Economics prize, F.A. Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. Hayek is famous for his opposition to the expert technocratic model; Myrdal was a full-on supporter of the technocratic model. But guess what: the technocratic model enthusiasts refused to engage with the Hayekians, saying that everyone agreed that the technocratic model with its carefully-crafted plans was the way to go. Somehow that sounds familiar.
In other words, people in the political world cannot coutenance anything unless it is a political solution, directed by the powerful. We know what is best, say the colonialist oppressors; We know what is best, say the post-colonialist autocrats. And why not? If you have managed to get yourself to the top of the political heap, you must be a genius, right?
No doubt, but what is interesting me, at the half-way point in the book, is that Easterly is carefully making his case on the argument from racism, that the western colonialists and experts were and are racists that operated on the assumption that ordinary people in the Third World just did not have the chops to develop their countries on their own.
But I want to make the problem bigger. After all, the whole point of the western welfare state is that ordinary western people just don't have the chops to manage their retirement, their end-of-life health care, their children's education on their own. They need the support of technocratic government programs.
I suspect that Easterly will get around to that, but he understands that to persuade the political and cultural elite he must argue from racism and not from economics.
For the extraordinary Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years took place in spite of everything and everybody. In my view nobody knew what was happening in the west 200 years ago, and if they had they would have stopped it. Ruling classes want to rule, and that is all. Ordinary people want to hang on to what they have, and that is all. Both are lemmings, that keep on going until they go over the cliff.
We have increased per-capita income by 30 times in 200 years, yet we can still get a Venezuela. How come?
Easterly tells a story familiar to the rebels that don't like being dictated to by the educated elite. The way of the world is for the best and the brightest to decide what is good for us, and then implement it, for our own good, of course.
Easterly approaches the issue with a review of development economics, the notion that experts and administrators know how to bring the backward nations of the world into the modern age with targeted plans formulated and executed by a central government advised by international experts.
On Easterly's telling, this all began a century ago at the intersection of economics and colonialism. The western colonial governments were starting to get a bit uncomfortable with the western domination of the rest of the world. How did democracy and self government mesh with the colonial domination of Africa and Asia? The answer was a clever one.
The backward people governed by the western colonialists were really too backward to be able to govern themselves and come up with ideas and plans for their own development, so the answer was for autocratic governments, colonial or post-colonial, to execute on economic development plans developed by European experts, the chaps who knew what they were doing. Politics was the answer.
It actually makes a lot of sense. If you are the ruling class the last thing you can countenance is to get up and abandon the levers of political power, and say to yourself, OK, our rule is unjust and we should just get the heck out of here. Instead what you do is elide the truth of your unjust rule, and perform a misdirection play. You say to yourself and to the world that, well, these backward people aren't really interested in political rights. So the best thing to do for them is to implement a targeted plan of economic development created and executed by us, the knowledgeable ones.
This is smarter than you might think. It appeals to the existing colonialists, and it appeals to any budding local nationalist revolutionary cadres. It flatters liberal reformers and it sidesteps the whole question of political legitimacy. Thus, between the world wars, there was a big effort to come up with a development plan for China, in which both the Rockefeller Foundation and Sun Yat-sen/Chiang Kai-Shek supporters collaborated. It conveniently dropped the question in which ordinary Chinese people were intensely interested, of western enclaves in China where western law superseded Chinese law.
Or in Africa, the colonialists came up with development plans after World War II to benefit "the natives" without really tackling the who-whom question of whether the western colonialists should be the ones to dictate such matters.
Of course, there were people that questioned the technocratic development model, and Easterly frames this opposition in the contrast between the two winners of the 1974 Nobel Economics prize, F.A. Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. Hayek is famous for his opposition to the expert technocratic model; Myrdal was a full-on supporter of the technocratic model. But guess what: the technocratic model enthusiasts refused to engage with the Hayekians, saying that everyone agreed that the technocratic model with its carefully-crafted plans was the way to go. Somehow that sounds familiar.
In other words, people in the political world cannot coutenance anything unless it is a political solution, directed by the powerful. We know what is best, say the colonialist oppressors; We know what is best, say the post-colonialist autocrats. And why not? If you have managed to get yourself to the top of the political heap, you must be a genius, right?
No doubt, but what is interesting me, at the half-way point in the book, is that Easterly is carefully making his case on the argument from racism, that the western colonialists and experts were and are racists that operated on the assumption that ordinary people in the Third World just did not have the chops to develop their countries on their own.
But I want to make the problem bigger. After all, the whole point of the western welfare state is that ordinary western people just don't have the chops to manage their retirement, their end-of-life health care, their children's education on their own. They need the support of technocratic government programs.
I suspect that Easterly will get around to that, but he understands that to persuade the political and cultural elite he must argue from racism and not from economics.
For the extraordinary Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years took place in spite of everything and everybody. In my view nobody knew what was happening in the west 200 years ago, and if they had they would have stopped it. Ruling classes want to rule, and that is all. Ordinary people want to hang on to what they have, and that is all. Both are lemmings, that keep on going until they go over the cliff.
We have increased per-capita income by 30 times in 200 years, yet we can still get a Venezuela. How come?
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