Book Review: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, by William Easterly. New York: Basic Books 2014. 416 pp, US$29.95 hardcover ISBN 978-0-465-03125-2
The technocratic approach to development that overlooks the importance of freedom and individual rights seems to be one of the primary reasons why some nations are still poor. Incremental improvements in freedom, which would enable societies to enjoy greater rights, would stimulate economic wellbeing, and would help to overcome the hurdles to economic and social development posed by autocratic regimes that receive help from experts and technocrats.
In a nutshell, this is the core message that William Easterly tries to convey in his latest book, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. Easterly here continues his distinction, from his earlier work The White Man’s Burden, between ‘searchers’ and ‘planners’, the two differently motivated ‘camps’ in the ‘development community’. However, his latest book goes somewhat further, as he focuses more on the two opposing approaches to development: bottom-up and top-down. He underlines how experts and autocratic regimes can neglect freedom and individual rights, and its possible consequences on the destiny of a whole society.
Echoing James Ferguson’s (1994) book in which Ferguson coined the notion of the “anti-politics machine,” the technocratic approach to development never focuses on individual rights and freedom. (1) Easterly has a valid point that overemphasis on material development may indeed result in the reorientation of our attention away from individual rights to development without rights. Technocrats, consultants, policy experts, or in general terms the “development community”, as the author calls it, undermines the role of governance in developing countries (pp.13-14). In the end, all policies are reduced to a technical level with a passive voice in reports and speeches, that does not reflect who would have a say in policymaking processes, and which may also determine the relative lack of influence of the poor in these processes.
Easterly makes a compelling case for individualistic values in contrast to collectivist values which prioritise nations. Individuals are conceived to be the driving engines of a whole society, and therefore are the key players who hold and accumulate knowledge at grassroots level. The central planners and experts, on the other hand, cannot access local knowledge. Thus, their approach, Easterly claims, paves the way to asymmetric and incomplete information as well as a lower degree of understanding of local conditions. If individuals are free from the grips of the central planners, and if central planners can set a freer environment allowing spontaneous orders to flourish, then a whole society might develop with the help of greater freedom and individual rights. This might be stimulated if central planners do not crowd out local knowledge, which is neglected especially when they forget history and try to start from scratch.
While the book proposes many valid points, Easterly misses some important aspects due to being overly-reductive and perhaps a bias toward individualism. First of all, his contrast between collectivism in the “East” and individualism in the “West” is too reductionist. It resembles labelling the “East” as autocratic due to a collectivist orientation, while the “West” is freer due to greater space for individualism. This is the underlying assumption behind Easterly’s argument (pp.317-320), and in his view the reason why the West’s economic growth during the last century out-performed the “East”.
Secondly, Easterly argues that favourable conditions, strong individualism, incentives to adopt technology, and a strong technological heritage, are crucial for economic growth. He argues that being able to challenge authority breeds technological advancement and therefore innovation. Conformist societies and authoritarian rule impede innovation. Although this argument is intuitively appealing to the reader, Easterly admits that the “East” inherited a strong technological heritage, as he mentions China as the epicentre of great technologies that had spread to the “West” during the Crusades. The ‘East’ has been and currently is technologically innovative and economically growing under authoritarian rule.
Thirdly, Easterly mentions the impact of finance on economic growth (pp.271-273). As an example of this, he discusses Korea’s rapid economic development within two or three generations. However, he does not mention how financial repression (e.g. directed loans to selected sectors, etc.) under the rule of a military junta government during the 1960s was utilised, where exporters had to compete for stable loan allocation by banks. In order to be eligible for bank loans, exporters had to comply with performance criteria set by the government. (2) Today’s South Korea, I would contend, is the result of an “economic development-first” ideology rather than a “rights-first” path to development and economic growth.
In the light of the discussion above, one might question if there is a kind of trilemma between a stronger state under autocratic regimes, democracy (accountability, rule of law, individuals rights, etc.), and social and economic development. Fukuyama (2011) underlines the essentiality of state and order for intensive growth. (3) Initial conditions may require a strong state which has “…[t]he ability to plan and execute policies and to enforce laws cleanly and transparently…”(Fukuyama, 2004: 7) , and therefore societies may opt for social and economic development while giving up their democratic aspirations, which was and is still the case in East Asia, with minor variations. (4) The other possibility would be opting for social and economic development and democracy established with individual rights rather than top-down imposed central plans for economic development. The state would not be governed by a strong and authoritarian regime, although its institutional capacity could be established beforehand in accordance with Fukuyama’s definition.
A third possibility could be one leader striving for an autocratic regime in a country which is currently under democratic rule. In this case, the country may not realise its potential social and economic development due mainly to political and economic instability. This might be the case in the so-called transition countries where democracy has been established through the ballot box. For instance, Sub-Saharan Africa since decolonisation, and the contemporary Arab world following the so-called Arab Awakening, would be two cases where a fierce and bloody competition between various political groups does not enable these countries to focus more on development, even if some sort of democracy, at least in the form of elections, does exist. This basic and incomplete understanding could be applied to produce derivatives for varying kinds of trilemmas, if there are any. To borrow from Eisenstadt’s notion of multiple modernities, each country currently experiences different levels of development, with varying political systems either efficient or inefficient in realising potential economic development given their factor endowments and potential changes in policies.
In the final analysis, the rights-based approach and the possible existence of a trilemma between an autocratic regime, democracy, and social and economic development does reduce the number of alternative policies we may put into operation as far as conditions in today’s world are considered. In order to propose rights-first or the development with rights approach of Easterly as a policy, we may need to answer several questions. First, even if a benevolent autocrat would be willing to give up the autocratic privilege, would it be in the interest of the autocrat to do so? If yes, under what conditions? Secondly, suppose the process would not be voluntarily initiated, then who would take the lead in starting a revolution? In an era of increasing number of middle-classes that have been considered to be the leading force of democratisation and development since the days of modernisation theory, one might question if middle-classes can really achieve the ‘divine cause’ of democratisation even in countries without a tradition of democracy. If the middle-classes cannot mobilise and if the autocratic regimes persist, then it is very much questionable if one can produce policies based on the ideal course of development depicted in Easterly’s book, as an alternative to the ‘planners’ and ‘autocrats’ aspirations to have a decisive say on the destiny of people.
Mehmet Kerem Coban is a PhD Student and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of The Asian Journal of Public Affairs at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His PhD thesis is focusing on the political economy of financial regulation in emerging market economies. He obtained his Master’s Degree in Development Studies at The Graduate Institute, Geneva. Email: m.keremcoban@nus.edu.sg
Notes
(1) Ferguson, J., 1994, Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Ferguson’s book could be used to better address the problem of an ‘anti-politics machine’ if one also reads Tania Murray Li’s work on Indonesia, in which the author makes use of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. See Li, T. M. (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham: Duke University Press).
(2)Studwell, J. (2013) How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region (London: Profile Books).
(3) Fukuyama, F. (2011) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (London: Profile Books).
(4) Fukuyama, F. (2004) State-Building, Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca & New York: Cornell University Press).
