Bookssave the Pawns Timber Plantation, Easterly Notes, Was No Help to the Families Who Were Forced from Their Land

booksSave the Pawns timber plantation, Easterly notes, was no help to the families who were forced from their land. It’s hard to Too many aid agencies treat people in believe that the farmers’ land rights would have been developing countries like chess pieces so easily discarded—or that the resulting violence BY TATE WATKINS would be so obscure—if these decisions had indeed been imposed on Ohioans. This book finds instructive anecdotes in many The Tyranny of Experts opens with a striking anecdote: historical times and places—pre-communist China, In 2010, soldiers removed 20,000 people from their Colombia during “La Violencia,” Benin after it Ohio farmland at gunpoint. The farmers and their escapes colonialism. Easterly makes clear that today’s families had lived on the tract for decades, but they had consensus about how to promote development pre- to make way for a British company’s forestry planta- dates its “official birth” under Harry Truman in 1949. tion, a project that was backed by the World Bank’s He goes back to Woodrow Wilson’s 1919, when colo- private-investment arm. The soldiers burned some res- nial and racial condescension was rife, and the world idents’ grain stores and houses, in the process killing an knew less about the damage the “best and brightest” eight-year-old boy trapped inside a building. can do to any society, even with the best of intentions. You might struggle to recall the atrocity. The default approach of development organiza- Author William Easterly explains why. While the The Tyranny of tions, he says, is implicit acceptance, if not outright Experts: Economists, events he reports happened as described, they didn’t support, of whoever happens to control a country. Dictators, and the unfold in rural Ohio. The setting was East Africa— Poor citizens are rarely consulted in any meaningful Forgotten Rights of specifically Uganda. way. Experts who see poverty as a set of technical the Poor Easterly has devoted much of his career to ana- By William Easterly problems ignore how political institutions—or polit- lyzing global development, a catch-all term for efforts ical oppressions—have created those problems. Too by rich countries to economically improve poor ones. many modern development efforts, Easterly argues, These undertakings have varying goals—some aim wind up overlooking the commonest cause of pov- to increase access to education, some to decrease the erty: “the unchecked power of the state against poor rate at which young children die from disease, others people without rights.” to teach tropical farmers better growing techniques. A Throughout this book, Easterly returns over professor at New York University and a former World and over to three modern illusions. The first is Bank economist, Easterly has for years critiqued the the belief that conscious design can bring about technocratic approaches that he says dominate the development much more quickly and easily than field. The subtitles of his first two books illustrate his spontaneous solutions—which the author insists perspective: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have will surface wherever people are afforded economic Done So Much Harm and So Little Good, and Econo- and political rights. A related theme is that techno- mists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. crats favor the collective abstraction of a “national “Morally neutral approaches to poverty do interest” over the reality of individual interests. not exist,” Easterly writes in his latest book. “Any The third theme is that outsiders often approach to development will either respect the rights ignore historical, cultural, and local consider- of the poor or it will violate them.” There are real ations, approaching a poor country as if it were risks to liberty in the dominant approach he describes a “blank slate.” Easterly describes how foreign today: a class of experts (often brought in from for- economists advised Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s eign countries) works with government bureaucrats post-independence dictator, to use government in a poor country to decide the future of its people. investment to develop industry. Nkrumah followed “The conventional approach to economic devel- their prescription. To raise the funds needed, he opment, to making poor countries rich,” he writes, taxed cocoa, one of the few industries already suc- “is based on a technocratic illusion: the belief that ceeding in Ghana—but a crop which happened to poverty is a purely technical problem amenable to grow in the mountains inhabited by his main oppo- such technical solutions as fertilizers, antibiotics, or sition. The taxes eventually throttled Ghana’s cocoa nutritional supplements.” In Uganda, the World Bank business and wider economy, while Nkrumah exerted experts saw the forestry project as a solution to pov- himself more and more to repress the opposition. erty, and had no objection to seeing the government Easterly’s examples are sometimes more loose displace thousands of local residents by force. Yet the anecdotes than continuous narrative. But they support WINTER 2015 53 his thesis that residents of poor countries rarely have The Slow Boat to Utopia any say over how billions of development dollars are Ten years in, the ballyhooed Millennium channeled. And that few of the development experts Villages Project is mostly a bust who wield that power ever question this arrangement. BY TRAVIS KAVULLA Today’s development problems, Easterly argues, come down to a “debate that never happened” between two Nobel-winning economists of the twentieth cen- tury. Swede Gunnar Myrdal saw national governments Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist and as the necessary mechanism of development. “From the celebrity academic, made a splash ten years ago with development point of view,” Myrdal wrote, “the prevail- his plan to engineer the end of poverty as we know ing attitudes and patterns of individual performance in it. His philanthropically funded Millennium Villages life and at work” are “deficient.” He advocated “putting Project (MVP) showered a few model African commu- obligations on people and supporting them by force” so nities with aid, for the sake of demonstrating that their that national development could be attained. abject poverty was the result of surmountable cultural Austrian Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, barriers coupled with a lack of outside investment. The championed the benefits that arise from a society’s professor (who had done some admirable work help- spontaneous order, in which individual rights allow ing stanch inflation in several countries emerging from The Idealist: Jeffrey people to freely choose, and they migrate natu- communism) had it all figured out. Sachs and the Quest rally to the optimal arrangements for exchanging Sachs’s book was a bestseller, and then Hol- to End Poverty goods, services, and ideas. Hayek saw no reason By Nina Munk lywood anointed him as the savior of Africa in that poor societies couldn’t prosper in the same way such works as the MTV documentary The Diary of that Western ones had centuries earlier. The miss- Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa. (Sachs ing ingredient was simply giving the residents of likens his project to an “Extreme Village Make- impoverished countries those same economic and over.”) In Nina Munk’s book The Idealist, however, political rights. he is a much more ambivalent figure. His passion Myrdal’s view won over the international aid for the poor pushes aside apathy and cynicism, but apparatus, says Easterly, because it’s the one in which also prudence and attention to unintended conse- technocracy is necessary. If expert design instead quences. His intelligence is commanding, but leaves of evolved solutions is placed at the heart of devel- no room for other input. Against sludgy bureau- opment, then central planners will have lots of job cracies and inept politicians he is a furious force, opportunities. If history, language, and local knowl- but his righteous indignation does not distinguish edge are defined as irrelevant or even retrograde, then between louts and perceptive critics. many pedigreed experts will need to be brought in Munk spent six years shadowing Sachs and from the outside. “The sleight of hand that focuses reporting on his village projects. She sat with him attention on technical solutions,” Easterly writes, in presidential palaces where he attempted to “while covering up violations of the rights of real rouse Tanzania’s leaders and Uganda’s president to people, is the moral tragedy of development today.” action. She watched him shout down a malariolo- Philanthropists face some of the same risks as gist he encountered on an airplane. She observed as government agencies when it comes to helping the “villagers danced for him, dignitaries put on their overseas poor. Private donors too can be tempted, Sunday suits and praised him, dozens of photos were as an illusory “shortcut,” to apply their expertise to snapped, and just before his arrival, schools and clin- help a population without respecting the individuals ics were scrubbed clean.” themselves. But philanthropists can also make deci- Munk set out to write the story of the MVP sions, much more nimbly than government agencies, without any preconceptions beyond her expertise as to avoid actions that undercut the individual rights a financial journalist. Sachs’s enthusiasm was infec- and dignity of poor people. These things, wise helpers tious, and his philosophy seemed logical at the start: will recognize, are not only as important as material poor villagers dwell in such extreme poverty, with so needs on moral grounds, they are also the only reliable many interlocking problems, that any single interven- long-term bases for material prosperity. tion would be worthless. A chronic malaria patient, for instance, does not have the energy for entrepreneur- Tate Watkins is a journalist and coffee-farm developer ship, so “development” in a capitalist sense is impossible.

Load more