post nonfiction best sellers list is "james madison," by lynn cheney. her recent talk from the nixon library will be aired throughout the weekend. good morning america anchor robin roberts comes in at number five with her memoir, "everybody's got something." and in sixth is "finding me: a decade of darkness, a life reclaimed," by ariel castro's kidnap victim, michele knight. michael lewis' book "flash boys," a look at high frequency trading. booktv hosted a program with him last month. coming in at eighth is a memoir, "can't we talk about something more pleasant?" number nine is @girlboss, and wrapping up the list at ten is "strength finder

2.0." these are some of the current best selling nonfiction books according to "the washington post." .. thank you for that warm introduction. it is a pleasure to be here with you at rand. i am going to talk today about something that has unconsciously and indirectly led to a tyranny

of experts. let's call that the technocratic approach to economic development. the idea that poverty is the technical problem. so that for example there are a variety of technical solutions. one involves a chemical on walls of people's houses, on the inside walls to kill mosquitos that kill malaria. technical solution that helps fight malaria. and other technical solution might be to convert land to higher value uses like food crops with low value to forestry products that have higher value. now let me tell you this purely technical approach, on the controversial items, not quite that easy. let me tell you a story. this is not a happy story.

this is not the run-up to a punch line to joke. i will try to work in some joke later but this is not the happy part of the talk, i am sorry. on the morning of sunday, february 28, 2010, the villagers in you got the word in church when they heard the sound of gunfire outside and they came out and find men with guns were burning down their homes and forcing their crops, shooting their livestock, keeping them at gunpoint from rescuing their burning homes and marched them away at gunpoint, 20,000 farmers lost their land. this happened in the guise of a world bank forestry project. the forestry project was a technical solution to raise

people's incomes. obviously it did not work out as intended. a couple of additional things. this is obviously an extreme story, a war story and there are additional things that are somewhat revealing of what this book calls the forgotten rights of the poor. the right of the 4 are so often neglected, ignored, forgotten. two things will happen next. unlike many other rights violations that happen, this one made it to the front page of the new york times, you would think that would have led to some collective response in this case. the world bank, a with doing an investigation, sounded like the right response at the time. and that is an investigation to

what happened. that was the first event for the forgotten rights of the 04. the second non event, hardly anyone protested. the last thing that is revealing is the story is literally forgotten by almost everyone except a few people paying attention on the outside and the victims themselves. this story is illustrative in that you cannot do what the world bank has always tried to do from its very founding. the articles of agreement have this clause in them. the world bank project shall be designed, loans shall be granted, project interventions shall be made, not taking into account the political characteristics of the government of the event. not considering the political character of the government whether it is an autocracy or men with guns or whether it is a

democratic government that recognizes political and economic rights. the world bank seems to have the illusion of something called economic considerations that can be separated out and economic considerations do not include the political character of the government. the political character of the government is not itself something that could be entering or helping economic development. this separation is what i am calling the technocratic approach of the government, the illusion that technical solutions can ignore the political system in which they operate. what are the consequences of this? let's get a couple things clear. one is development is not always very open about this but it is a field that is making recommendations about how to make people better off.

in order to make normative recommendations you that have to state your own normative values so for example, i personally would consider this rights violation i just described upfront in and of itself, i would consider the rights of look for that were violated, the political right to protest what happened to them and the economic rights, property right they held over the land that was taken away from us. i would openly state that those rights are in and of themselves, the principle of freedom of choice, the next consent, of individuals is a value in and of itself. i don't want to kind of play fast and dirty and say the moral statement automatically wins the argument for the rights of the poor because there could be other competing moral goods that maybe there is a trade-off with

other morally good things we are trading off. we cannot ignore the normative value of the rights of the port in and of themselves. that is primarily the way the rights have spread historically, people treat them as something good and and of themselves that they want for themselves. the second thing to consider is a system based on political and economic rights, isn't it more likely to foster economic development. and maybe it is the reverse. maybe you need an autocrat to implement economic development, and higher standards of living that have already been met. this is a debate we need to have

and this is not a normative debate, do political and economic rights and economic development. economic development, and is autocracy to make the development happen. what does this need to have in the economic development? what has happened by having a technocratic approach, they are not having that debate. this article is still in agreement. the world bank is not allowing itself to openly talk about the issue of democracy or autocracy. and the past two world bank presidents. and democracy in a speech.

and a four or five term for democracy. and i talk to the world bank spokesman, and he said he is not allowed to use democracy. haven't you read world bank article 4 section 10? and that does not an acceptable state of affairs. and binding other operations who want to promote development. and caring about development, we should openly debate whether democracy, individual rights for the 4, are a good thing i not for development. and that debate as not happen anywhere near enough. and taken anywhere near seriously enough in economic development.

let me give you a little bit of history on the technocratic idea. how has it held on so long that it has never been changed and a technocratic approach is followed by a lot of people still today? one fun thing authors get to do when they do research for books is they get to do reading in areas that turn out to be fun and one area that turned out to be fun for me was studying the history of the idea of technocratic development. one thing i found was it was not a new idea any time recently. it went back deep into colonial times, here i am showing a technocratic report that was done in 1938 by the british colonial office, british colonial office lord haley did this report in 1938, this report is 1,837 pages long.

a very long list of technical solutions to poverty in africa which reads remarkably like a united nations report done in 2005. that was one of its thing i could find. the u.n. report was authored by an economist to is a professor at columbia whose name i cannot remember right now. i think angelina jolie supplied a consultant's report for it. the only thing i want to take away from this is the technocratic ideas that what is missing is a technical solution doesn't fare too well in this slide. this particular four problems and four technical solutions has been around 70 years. it is hard to argue the problem was a technical solution we were missing until experts came

along. it doesn't seem there's a shortage of experts. we had experts in the next several years, it was not all that successful because we are still talking about the same solution 70 years later, now almost 80 years later. the other way in which this history is interesting, this technical approach forms a lot of the justification, by the time of world war ii. they were openly racist, the british were superior to inferior races to develop, and that was politically deadly by the time of world war ii, and wanted to offer a more benevolent vision to colonial subjects that was not so openly insulting and racist and

technocratic justification. we are the people who are going to help you solve your material poverty, a list of technical solutions. and the debate going on, on a very different context. and that is the perspective. and for colonialism, that colonialism was one of the regime's, being neutral about not only dictatorship, it was also colonialism. the political character could not be considered in a world bank loan and their world bank loans to colonial territories of the british. a set of colonial mentality at the time which i don't want to

be unfair and tarnish colonialism. and what the issues are when we see the colonial debate. they had to convince the americans, one easy way, bert ely was shrewd. and the technocratic justification, and it was a technocratic approach to one of the internally underdeveloped regions which were african-americans, and eleanor roosevelt had lunch with a black leader during world war ii, and this was the reality. can you postponed the challenge to segregation, the new deal

will offer technocratic solutions to material poverty of black people in the united states. think about this debate, and they saw the peril of colonialism and aaron treatment of blocks in the united states, offered material solutions to block poverty, not the rights to end segregation or the rights to vote. what happened after the end of colonialism? one thing you have to know is the end of colonialism was not anticipated by anyone during world war ii. it was a surprise collapsed, 15 years later. there are statements i could show you, the british expected their empire in africa to in dorr for generations if not centuries. this was justification for the empire but what happened after

colonialism did collapse? a new set of parties found technocratic justification for authoritarian rule to be very helpful. this is called colonialism to be testified. a new set of autocrats came on this team which where the indigenous autocrats in africa. they found it -- they did not want to give rise to that either. and a new autocrat that could justify their own rules for technocratic ideas, let us autocrats be in power so that we can solve material poverty. kind of like it used to be that divine right of kings, it became the development right of dictators that really justified

dictators. the u.s. was also happy about this because the autocrats make better allies than democrats during the cold war so the u.s. when it started getting into economics, saber happy to support autocrats during the cold war. a very well-known story, the new angle i am suggesting you add is ideas that justify autocrats also have political motivation. this story is not only historical, we are in a new situation that is analogous to the cold war, the war on terror. it is used to justify autocrats and these lastly evolve to development agencies,

development experts, philanthropists, because these ideas make the operation of philanthropy much easier that has direct appeal that never goes away. as one philanthropist never heard of named william gates jr. bill gates ring a bell? he said in 2012, a dictator in ethiopia had, quote, made real progress in helping the people of ethiopia. bill gates said that the donors working on their technocratic solutions together with the government they followed this approach, set clear goals choosing an approach, measuring results and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach, this helps

us, sort of unwitting or may be waiting kind of coalition of the autocratic government, the donors, philanthropists, experts working together with autocrats, helps us to deliver tools and services to everybody who will benefit. now, bill gates was partly enthusiastic because ethiopia had had a few years of good growth which he gave the credit for a few years of high-growth and there are also a few years of measured reductions in child mortality which he gave the credit for, so let's talk about how much the development community has had this debate on the positive value of rights versus hypocrisy.

in giving the credit to tomellis he is factually stating autocracies good or acceptable or neutral for development. one of the things about the debate in development is people always are looking either for autocratic success stories with in developing countries or if you challenge that they want you to provide democratic success stories from developing countries. one strange thing has been going on throughout the history of development, looking for possible models for how to succeed at development we have excluded the cases of all those who actually succeeded at development. this is pretty important so let me repeat that. having any debate about how to succeed at development we excluded the models of those who succeeded at development. very strange way to handle

evidence so we excluded north america, australia, new zealand, japan, western europe, recently joined by other success stories within the developing countries that had greater political and economic freedom but the strange thing is the exclusion of the history of development, that excluded all of the successes shows you something in the way in which this debate has not really been happening enough. that we would treat the evidence in such a strange way and that we would this bill great would celebrate just a very few years of apparent success which he automatically without further evidence given credit to mellis senai without crediting democracy and development. one other bit of direct evidence is when you see something good happening in a country there's a tendency to infer that the leader must be a good guy

because good things are happening. that is a very strong tendency in development. even if you have direct evidence that the leader is not such a good guy. zanaowi had been shedding his autocratic credentials over a number of years prior to bill gates's statement. his security forces had killed peaceful demonstrators in the streets after rig the elections in 2005. manipulated famine relief in 2010 to go only to winning party supporters and the night it to the opposition in which he was caught red handed by human-rights watch, but there was the same sequence i described in you gone the. a promise to investigate and the investigation was quietly canceled and never happened and there was no protests. and the force to the.

program that involved resettlement, another were rights violation, financed by the world bank. there's also a peaceful blunder, he served 18 years in jail, for unlike the president of the world bank he did use the word democracy and for that crime of which he was completely innocent, that crime is not serving 18 years in prison in ethiopia. the aleutians that we can ignore the rights of the poor is what i protest here. i really think we have to have this debate, we have been talking about development for so long and this debate has not happened. everyone is happy with these technocratic ideas.

and the british colonial secretary on how well lord haley had done to find the british empire, how happy the americans were with technocratic development and how happy everybody was. that is an actual copy i find on the internet of the colonial secretary during world war ii. these ideas work for everyone, experts, agencies, autocrats, foreign-policy, it also makes foreign policy easier because our national security interests and development interests can be complementary, if we think autocrats are good allies in the war on terror, and with development aid and praise accomplishes killing two birds with one stone. if we had this inconvenient idea that autocrats are not the solution, that they are the

problem, actually an obstacle development, we would be in a more difficult situation of having a trade-off between whatever we think we are doing on the national side supporting data supporting allies, each feel the and you gondola our major allies in the war on terror. they are both supportive of the u.s. military command in africa than the u.s. regional military command in africa and served in un peacekeeping troops and even the war in iraq. 7 the case of you gonna . everything is easier, right thurgood thing and that world becomes more difficult. many of you like i did for 16

years are involved in development efforts. you, the five. points on how to operation allies these principles in foreign aid. let me go immediately to that slide. [laughter] >> i don't have one. i have done something here which has already got me into a lot of trouble and will probably get me in more trouble here today. i have the heretical view.we have to get principles right before we talk about operational wising anything and what has not happened is not a lack of operational recommendations, not a lack of five bullet policy fixes, it is lack of agreement

on the basic principles of whether we should have development that is the same way the u.s. development, a high degree, high and growing degree of recognition of individuals economic and political rights or do we in fact support an authoritarian development? that is the debate that has not happened enough and i want to happen and so until that happens, until we have that debate and we agree on what the principles should be i am not going to give policy recommendations about implementing rights and aid when people are not convinced that rights do matter. we have to do the convincing and then we will operation allies the principles. if we could think about this a little bit, let's go back to the example of american blacks to clarify our thinking about this. there is a different way to be thinking about this and it would

help if we think of it in the context of u.s. history. so the civil rights movement that happened in the 1960s, martin luther king comes along and other black figures come along, there is advocacy for change, levels of principles saying the principle that blacks and whites have equal rights is not being recognized with in the segregated south and until that principle is recognized, it was not about -- martin luther king when he said things like i have a dream that one day people will be free at last, he was not -- this time i have a dream stuff is nice that how you operatio l operationalize that toward blacks in mississippi? that kind of question would have just been an excuse to avoid the

debate that blacks and white plaid should have equal rights or think of it another way, at a program that surprised george wallace, support for his segregationist regime in alabama, what we object to that because it was in fact financing material welfare projects that improve the wealthy and blacks in alabama? ..

>> we really, really do care enough about the rights of the poor that we would protest when there's such a rights violation in uganda, and we would protest when there's such a rights violation in ethiopia. and so that's the debate that must happen. that is the thing that's happening around the world now. there are much bigger things than aid happening around the worldful we have the struggle for the ideals of freedom and democracy happening in ukraine, happening in vens venezuela, happening to a degree not covered enough in the western media in ethiopia and in china. that's the big debate that is much bigger than foreign aid, much bigger than western foreign policy interests. and that's the debate that we should be having. so i will close by showing my own sentimental, idealistic slide by paraphrasing some very famous words. i think what needs to happen is that we hear resolve.

development shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. thanks very much. [applause] >> so we'll now take some questions. >> dr. easterly, your analysis that the world, you know, leads one to the conclusion that the world bank and other agencies might not be looking at the rights of the poor as they should. of course, you have white experience in this matter. i'm just going to talk from my own experience of working on a couple of projects that were, that i was involved with in in the last year, both of which were funded by the world bank. and be for both of these, one on

urbanization in pakistan, the mandate was explicitly to look at the rights of the poor. and that's how we framed our analysis. so, for example, when we looked at transportation -- [inaudible] within cities in pakistan, we looked at how these could be structured so that the lifestyle and so on that link the poor with the mainstream -- [inaudible] and the world bank was very happy with that analysis. another example i was involved with was looking at trade in south asia. the political economy should -- [inaudible] and a key aspect of that analysis was to look at how trade could benefit cross-border regions which are typically very -- [inaudible] that, too, was an explicit focus of the study. i'm just wondering, when i hear you and i'm talking about the only example of the world

bank -- [inaudible] or looking at something differently, the way i should? >> yeah, no, thank you for that question, that's very good. and there is, there are efforts within aid to do things that try to give poor people more rights, that try to spread democracy. there are words like empowerment, community participation, strengthening civil society. i guess this debate that i'm talking about is really happening at a much larger level than that, because it's like the world bank has, like, a very split -- the world bank and other aid agencies have a very split sort of approach at a very kind of small and somewhat -- i'm sorry, it's a somewhat unclear way in which all these words that sound good are actually the same thing as what i'm talking about which is fundamentally a system, a political system that is

democratic and which the leaders of the country are democratically accountable to the citizens which the citizens have the freedom of speech, freedom of the media, the right to protest, to have -- to elect leaders that will respond to them and reject those who do not respond to them. so those -- the macro level which the world bank says it is not able to talk about, and then there's sort of the very much smaller level at which these efforts you're talking about are happening, and i'm sorry if -- forgive me for for being contra, but some of these slogans are so vague that i think they are committing, they know that the issue so threatening and so divisive and so dangerous that they, that there's a reason for the ambiguity and the vagueness of these phrases like empowerment and participation, you know this and, in fact, another bit of colonial history is these words have actually been used for many decades going

back into colonial times. participation in particular has been a favorite word of both the colonial and the aid establishments for decades. and so the ambiguity of those phrases is necessary politically. and one thing i wanted to get across here is i'm not saying that anyone involved in this system that refuses to have this debate on autocracy, none of them are bad people. they are politically constrained people. they're people constrained by politics. and so the constraint by politics means that these little efforts can never constitute any kind of threat to the rule of the autocratic regimes that do not respect and react to the poor. so that's the way in whether there's a split -- in which there's a split effort that's automatically denying the autokrautic rights to the poor. >> political constraints. i think people are trying to do the best that can be done.

>> i agree with that. i agree with that. >> right. >> certain yeah. >> therefore, you think there is no feedback from whatever is being done in government, an example is what milton friedman did in chile, and people vilified him, but he later went on record and said that improving economic freedom in chile did lead to political freedom. so you think that there is no reverse feedback from whatever little development that we can do back into rights and political freedom? >> yeah. i mean, this is -- i'm glad you raised this chile example. i think there is a view among some sort of free market-oriented economists that almost like the ideal situation is to have a free market autocrat like, you know, pinochet in chile who will sort of really ram through the kind of free market reforms that you need. and then after that you can, you

know, democracy can happen once you're kind of guaranteed that the free market reforms will stick in chile. that may or may not be the right story for chile, and i don't think that generalizes to any kind of normative recommendation that i would be happy with. it sounds really like a the technocratic justification for an autocrat. you can have a tech technocratic justification for an autocrat who does the free market reforms that you want, the technical solutions that you want. there are always sort of these outside experts like i would include friedman as one of them because he was not just being an academic economist, he was being a sort of development expert in his involvement in policy. but they're really part of the problem. and most of the time these kind of attempts to force sort of free market policies implemented by autocrats on other societies

have led to backlash other than success as they did in chile. and i think that what's really miss anything that is a more -- missing in that is a more unified respect for both the political and economic rights of the poor for both political and economic freedom. that these cannot be split apart and say, well, you know, we want economic freedom, and we don't care as hutch about political freedom -- as much about political freedom. that's not really viable as a welfare statement. people themself do not separate their rights that way. and there's no evidence that, you know, it's difficult enough to get some kind of body of evidence on the competing stories of democracy versus autocracy. it's really almost impossible to get any kind of rigorous evidence on what is the right transition path. i think we're kind of stuck with kind of general statements that we have to kind of choose on which side is the relative weight of evidence heavier, a

more democratic approach or an autocratic approach? and democratic including both political and economic freedom. and then what the transition path looks like on the way to that, we neither want to impose a transition path, nor try to veto any transition path as outside experts. it just will happen the way it happens. and it will be uneven, but there's no sense in which outside experts can engineer that in some kind of optimal way. i really reject that hypothesis as not being based on any solid body of evidence. >> [inaudible] >> sure. >> i am a student here. i don't have experience in consultants in other countries. >> you're not one of the bad experts. [laughter] in fact, the way i'm defining bad experts, it does not include anyone in this room at the moment. [laughter] >> but certain that i know is it

is difficult to define what is a good democracy. you gave us an example where it seems clear that that's not a democracy. but the majority of cases are in the middle where we really don't know if it's good or bad. i got extremely confused by your presentation because -- >> okay. let me try to unconfuse you. >> hopefully, yeah. now i think, well, what would you do with this whole in the middle contest where we really don't know they are good or bad? so we are -- [inaudible] before giving them aid. >> yeah. yeah, well, i think one -- a couple of things to clear up right away. i'm not like saying you need to have some kind of, like, utopian ideal of political and economic rights before anything else good will ever happen. that's not what i'm saying. i'm saying that you need to have

the ideal clear as a destination, the ideal of political and economic rights, the ideal that all men are created equal, poor people deserve rights just as much as rich people and that specific violations of those rights by the aid agencies themselves should be protested because part of our advocacy for development -- which includes rights. so i'm saying those things. i'm not saying there's some kind of utopian thing that you can just flip a switch. i'm not offering a new panacea. there are no panacea, there are no utopias on the idea. i'm just offering an ideal i think has not been embraced enough by the development. it's as if the development has been 99.9% about the deprivation of poor people. technical solutions, the neglect, you know, of whether authoritarians are violating the rights of poor people. i'm just saying let's rebalance a little bit.

rights are a good thing in and of themselves. we should not bias the debate, the positive debate on whether rights work and some of the strange things we do like excluding rich country cases. and u.s. history, for example. it wasn't that at the moment in 1776 when the u.s. was at half the level of africa in per capita income and a low level of education and there are these statements, you know, endowed with unalienable rights. governments by the consent of the governed. all men are created equal. these rights were, of course, being violated at that moment by slavery, by the lack of women's rights, by many other things. and we've been on a journey.

principles are an engine of social change. much more so than the five bullet points that will be quickly forgotten by everyone. you know, whatever they are. yes, you have a valid question about there are countries that are in between. the question is sort of what direction are they going? what destination do they recognize as desirable? everyone is in between. the u.s. itself is not any kind of democratic utopia. but what is the destination, what is the principle that states the destination to be? and the destination should be, you know, ever growing political and economic rights. >> hi. i'm also not one of the experts, but -- >> great, great. >> i'm, like, totally with you on the rights issue.

but i'm wonder wondering sort of in selling this approach if we would fall into the same rhetorical trap that a lot of the language of rights, of political participation and freedom, it just so happens that there's a correlation with the former colonial masters as well. so i don't know if in the research you've seen similar kinds of things. you've mentioned empowerment and also, you know, the preoccupation of rights. are those who perhaps for their own agenda would say that's, you know, a western colonial concept in itself? and certainly quoting from american history, historical documents might suggest some of those things. how would you address, you know, that kind of concern? if folks try to pose this argument again as sort of north and south and colonial versus -- >> i'm not sure if i'm getting your point exactly. are you saying that western advocates of rights might have their ownokomç8ñ agenda which y to impose on the rest of the world, is that what you're -- >> i'm saying --

>> you asking me to consider that possibility? there i'm saying how would you respond to that critique? >> yeah, yeah. >> is what i'm saying. >> it's what? >> that it's probably self-interested. >> yeah. so let me be say something sort of big and philosophical about that first. the big and philosophical thing is that as economists or even as sort of advocates for social change we always kind of have this split personality. at one point we're starting the political economy of ideas. which i think is something that's not been studied enough and that i'm trying to talk about a lot more here than is usually talked about. and so that in itself is something that gives us insight, it might also give us something useful that we understand that ideas are not just things that people usurp for their own

reasons, but they have a political agenda. at the same time, it's, you know, at a philosophical level we want to appeal sort of outside that system where political interests determine what are their accepted ideas and ideals, and we want to appeal to some kind of, like, natural law that we normatively believe in of what rights should look like, what we believe are good principles. and we do that all the time in economics, you know? just as like to do sort of an analogous exercise, we might consider the economic policy and recognize that the economic policy is what it is not because of the merits of that policy, but because of a political alliance that led to that policy. but then we also have the ability to ten outside this and say, well, we think this is a bad policy for such and such reasons, you know, according to economic principles. like those that i'm talking

about today. and so i think we're always this that kind of split personality view that we recognize the political constraints, but we also try to step out of them as if we're trying to change the political constraints by appealing to people's sense of what is a normative good thing. that that will change the constituency that people will care not only about the material deprivation of the poor, but they will care more about the dignity and rights of poor. and that could lead to some shift that would maybe break the alliance that is now happening between national security and development in maybe a constructive in which we do recognize there's, actually, a terrible trade-off between if you do think you need to support an autocrat for the war on terror, that's bad for development in that country if you take that other view. and so it really does change the way you look at the world. and, you know, one thing i resist a lot in this, that has been tormenting me throughout my

career is this sort of insistence that we can never talk about just sort of understanding the way development happens, understanding the world of development. we can't talk, we can't spend enough time talking about sort of the principles. even when they're very simple principles of how development happens. any development discussion, it seems like there's this imperative that it has to lead within the first three minutes to an aid policy recommendation. and that's, that's an intellectual prism that prevents us from having these bigger debates that are happening in the rest of the world. the rest of the world is having this bigger debate about autocracy versus democracy. we're, you know, i'm checking my ipad every minute to see if russia has invaded ukraine yet. we are really on the front lines of the ballot on freedom versus awe tock procity. if we as development economists think we are not involved in that battle and we tonight have

our own contribution to that battle. >> so we have several more questions in santa monica after which i'll turn to people who are joining us remotely. until then, please continue to mute your microphone so we don't get so much interference. thanks. >> so i'm relying on as one of the main principles this idea that all men are created equal, and and all citizens of the u.s. are created equal is more an accurate and precise notion for what it has been achieved at a great cost, actually, in the u.s. but if you move that and you take it seriously to the next step at a global scale, if you look at the cost that had that simple principle to the u.s. for a kind of homogeneous population within the 13 states, do you

think seriously that all people are equal? we love to say it, but on practice crossing the border in any direction, like the way of a person goes by, i don't know, 0.0001 or something like -- >> right, absolutely. >> and i'm -- and changing that is costly. >> right, sure. sure. >> and so that might be a reason why you don't have the kind of principled debate -- >> sure. well, i mean, i guess the big counterexample to what you're saying is people do seem to care a lot about the material poverty of those outside the u.s. i mean, not -- when i say "a lot," you know, it means kind of generous helpings of involvement by bono and madonna and angelina jolie. but there is quite a lot of public debate, lots of books,

lots of columns, lots of attention being given to efforts to alleviate material poverty in very poor places around the world. and so that i take as a sort of certain bench mark level of caring. and what i'm really trying to say is that i wish i could, we could -- i wish we could change that kind of caring into something that i think is more respectful of how poor people themselves would look at the problem. this, again, gets back to your issue, is this something that westerners are imposing as their own agenda of rights on poor people? i don't think that's true. i think there are lots of poor people who do very much want their own rights, they want their dignity to be respected. and i think, you know, we have as our obligation to respect that and to offer them an approach to, of aid and development discussions to the problems of poor people that doesn't treat poor people as

these sort of passive, helpless resent bls of -- receptacles of a bundle of needs that are not being adequately met, but as dignified human beings with rights. and that's, you know, changing the existing amount of caring in a different direction that recognizes rights and not just material needs. >> hello. >> so you, you drew a distinction when you talked about milton friedman between his role as a development policy expert and an academic economist, and i think sometimes academic economists draw that distinction, and many of them have worked on these political rights already like my colleague here and also, you know, other examples. chris -- [inaudible] did work on land tenure rights and -- [inaudible] on political representation of women. and it seems that sometimes those efforts get ignored. so in advancing the debate on political rights.

>> sure, sure. >> so i guess maybe that's a perennial problem of how do you get policymakers to listen to evidence, but it is still, i think, a pretty big question if we have some incremental evidence, how do you get it paid attention to? and then on the other hand, there is one notable exception in the development aid community that is already accepted as complete, and i'm thinking of the millennium challenge corporation which has political rights as a prerequisite from receiving any aid and, in fact, sometimes withdraws funding when negative developments occur. is that a perverse outcome? is that the ideal outcome? and how, i mean, perhaps this is already too far into operationalizing principles that we may not have accepted already, but i guess what is your response to the millennium challenge corporation's -- >> yeah, yeah. well, i do think the millennial challenge corporation was

founded on good principles and with the eruption of the sense for the need for these kind of principles. that was a good thing. the only reason i'm not jumping up and down and saying this is already the solution is that all the bad autocrats were done, simply reassigned to usaid. [laughter] the millennium challenge corporation would take the good guys, and usaid would take the bad guys. you know, and, yes, about the academic economists. yes, a lot of them do accept these principles, and they'd be very -- this would be treated as kind of embarrassingly original 101 if this was a purely academic discussion we were having. these are widely accepted. i think there's a phrase i once heard about sort of another set of principles that could apply to this situation, that these principles are simple but not easy. they're very simple to understand, but then it's not

easy, what you actually do with them, where you actually go next. and i think the role of academic economists is just to keep clear the very simple principles and to make sure the audience that i'm addressing which is really the applied development policy community, the ones -- that's who i'm calling sort of the relevant experts -- who do think that they are sort of in charge of development in a sense. there is a sort of tyranny of experts. not as attacking anyone individual is a bad idea, but they think the solutions will be implemented and that is the way development happens, and bill gates seemed to be addressing that view in that quote that i gave. that community does not accept that these academic insights into sort of rights and good institutions is being a basis of development. they do think that their development efforts that are, you know, helping autocrats do technical solutions are a development. and i'm saying, no, it's not.

it's actually undevelopment. >> there any questions in washington, d.c.? pittsburgh. >> hello, pittsburgh. >> earth, more generally? [laughter] all right. >> the political economy of ideas. now, there's some who allege even things like political rights and economic rights, freedoms are western constructs and -- [laughter] the world as a new form of colonialism. how would you combat those claims? how would you respond to that? >> it'd be interesting to hear who is actually making those claims. are they being made by autocrats who we might want to discount their views a little bit by having a little bit of

self-interest in how that view comes out. you know, the reality is it's very difficult to go around and rigorously establish what the views of poor people are. i can give you some inspiration aliquotations, i -- i inspirational quotations, surveys that have been done by co-authors which have gone around and interviewed lots of poor people and seem to generate a lot of qualitative statements of poor people saying they do want, they do want rights. there's, like, one statement that sticks in my head was just simply a man in uganda saying why can't i do what i want with my own cow, you know? that's fairly elementary at that level, that people do not want to be coerced. they want the right to run their own lives. and if you want the more eloquent version, the imprisoned ethiopian blogger wrote

explicitly, look, we need to recognize that rights are not an esoteric western virtue, they are a universal aspiration. and certainly people, dissidents around the world are acting that way, that they're willing to lay their lives on the line to fight for the rights of people in china and ethiopia and other autocratic places. >> is there any attempt by outside forces to inject democratic principles into an autocratic culture, just another form of -- [inaudible] and i specifically refer to the 40 or so countries of sub-saharan africa where for the last five decades or more attempts have occurred in virtually every country by many, many outside forces with no successes except for very short glimpses of success. and so, there therefore, if nota

credit culture exists and is resistant to external forces creating democratic principles, aren't we dealing with the same, as you said, technocratic solutions that bear no results? >> well, it depends on what you mean by with, you know, an autocratic culture. you know, an audit accuratic system in which an autocrat threatens with very brutal punishment anyone who challenges autocracy, i'm not sure whether to call that a culture or just an oppressive autocratic system. and as far as the values themselves, i think values are, you know, people cannot openly espouse democratic values in public when they are threatened and is on. so i don't think -- and so on. i think of that as the coercion of the autocrat.

and the pessimism on africa, i don't think, is quite justified. actually there has been some very courageous democracy movements in africa, and some of them have been successful. ghana, for example. you could think of ghana as a really interesting case that involved both economic and political freedom. because first there was sort of economic, a sort of resistance of denial of economic rights by a people just kind of, you know, working in the informal sector or smuggling or evading the controls of the state. and when it was brutal, to presentation of even cocoa production in ghana. and people would just evade those controls, and that was a form of resistance against the autocratic control of their economic rights. and later there was a democracy movement in ghana that was successful, and ghana's now had four successive democratic elections. there are still many problems, but there is success there. and if you look at the big trends, and this this is somethg

that i wanted to be very sure to remember to say is that big trends around the world are in the direction of greater degree, greater level of both political and economic freedom over the past several decades. we've had the fall of the berlin wall, of course, which we should not forget which was a gigantic change in the state of ideas and the embrace of freedom around the world. and we've had what was kind of unbroken rule of military autocrat, military dictators in latin america turn into a situation where now latin america's mostly much more democratic than that. and is we've had, you know, africa changed from kind of an assortment of sort of really awful, horrific autocrats like idi amin and the central african republic to now you hear autocrats that are not quite so horrific or even democracies. so i think there is progress, and that's one hopeful thing i

do want to make clear. when we're talking about advocating for these ideas, we're advocating for democratic principles that are winning in the long run. there is a greater degree of political and economic freedom. the trend is upward over the past four decades. we are winning this battle. and so there is hope. we're not talking about some kind of hopeless cause that is facing impossible odds. we are on the side in which history is going anyway. >> hello? okay. >> yes. >> thank you very much for your presentation. and as ukrainian, thank you for your support and that you do care about my home country. and my question is a little bit -- [inaudible] to the tyranny of experts. and what is the role of -- [inaudible] in this normative debate? if there is a tyranny of mass

media rather than the tyranny of experts? >> you mean mass media in the west or in the -- >> in the world. >> in the rest of the world. >> i mean -- >> in both. >> it seems to me that it's everywhere. >> yeah, yeah. >> and so what would you say about that? >> yeah. well, of course, freedom of the press is a very important value in and of itself, an important way in which positive social change happens. both positive social change towards more democracy, but also in and of itself being a sort of democratic correction mechanism. that when something bad happens, the freedom of the press -- and that which nowadays includes not only mass media that could be concentrate inside a few hands and could be subject to bribery and manipulation by the political authority, you know, there's this hopeful trend that with the rise of social media, with blogging and twitter and facebook and other forms of social media that there's even

more freedom of the press available true these nontraditional -- through these nontraditional types of press. you know, if you want to think of a simple example of the way in which that leads to prevention of abuses like what happened in uganda, think of the example that happened close to me. i live in new york city. there's a big story locally, i don't know if you heard about it nationally that a certain new jersey governor created a traffic jam on a bridge, chris christie. you know, he paid an enormous political price even for such a relatively minor abuse compared to taking away farmers' homes at gunpoint. that's freedom of the press in action, you know? the ability of the press to comment on that. now, i think your concern about mass media is the concern that, yes, media could be bribed or coerced by those in power, but that's, of course, that's the opposite of freedom of the press. that's the way, that's slavery

of the press. when there is freedom of the press, i think it's a very positive force for change. >> thank you, professor. i just want to -- [inaudible] >> yeah, yeah. >> there's some who will argue -- [inaudible] examples like rwanda, places like singapore -- [inaudible] what do you -- [inaudible] >> yeah. well, i'm glad you say that because it makes clear that the idea of the benevolent dictator, this debate about whether there are such benevolent dictators or not is not a straw man, and it is a real debate that we need to have. the cases that you mentioned are the same, they are somewhat like the pinochet case in which

there's an increase in economic freedom, and then the credit for this is given to the autocratic power. i think the attribution is not all that clear. it's not all that clear we should make that attribution. i mean, i think even more than political rights there's a way in which i sort of alluded to this already, there's a way in which people resist the denial of their economic rights by trying to evade the controls that are put on them. there's a lot of erase -- there's a sort of a resistance movement in people switching from the formal sector to the informal sectors, hiding economic activities from the state that is trying to repress, denying them the right to make their own living. i think we should think of that as some combination of maybe a ruler who is willing to go along with economic reforms which could, indeed, be the case in some cases. but we should also recognize the

possibility that the ruler is sort of forced to go along with those economic reforms because they have no choice. i think jerry rawlings, i was actually -- my first world bank mission was to ghana in 1985. which was meaningful to me because this is completelier relevant, i had actually lived in ghana before that as a teenager, and it was very -- when i arrived in '85, it was very striking what bad shape ghana was in. in 1985. and there was a sense in which rawlings really had no choice. the economy had hit rock bottom. and it was just no way out. there's a story that he sort of shopped his options around to the soviet bloc and to the world bank, the imf because he really had no choice. he attacks -- let's use cocoa as an example. he attacks cocoa, and he and his predecessors had taxed it so much that it had disappeared. there was virtual no production,

no exports in ghana, so there's nothing left to oppress. so that sort of forced him to accept that the resistance had won. the resistance that refused to go along with having their economic rights violated by producing cocoa where all the profits went to the state and they were starving, the cocoa growers would be forced to starve while they produced profits that would all go to the state. they refused to do that, and they won. rawlings was forced to concede that cocoa producers should be allowed to produce in a way that they could keep more of the rewards of their own production. and i think that's an alternative way of thinking about it that i invite you to consider. it's not just about some benevolent guy saying i need to do these economic reforms because they're good things. i think it's some combination of the two. and almost all these examples that you mentioned. yes, please.

>> i'm not an expert yet, so -- [laughter] >> okay. okay. well -- >> but my question is regarding what you call democracy. >> yeah. >> first of all, is there a definition? because everyone's definition seems to be different. even within culture. >> yeah. >> in the middle of my country, in the southern part. what is democracy? so in your debate -- >> which country are you referring to? >> congo, west africa. >> yeah. >> so in that debate that you talk about, democracy, how do you actually -- your view of democracy, the view of the western world democracy might be very different than the view of sub-saharan africa and even northern africa. so how do you get into talking about and knowing that we have multiple of, views of it? and second to that, you know, when you think, for instance, of china -- and i'm not saying china is perfect, but they have gotten 400-600 million out of

poverty with their government. >> yeah. yeah. >> it's hard to grapple with the idea do we need democracy and what kind of democracy when you also think about countries, you know, in the medieval time, i don't think those were considered, they were not considered democracy where they were really looting their own citizens. so how do we grapple with all these ideas and try to make, to solve that puzzle? >> yeah, yeah. so first of all on the definition of democracy, of course i think each seat does need to evolve their own ideas and their own norms, but i think there are certain sets of common problems around the world that are confronted both by what we're talking about when we're talking about democracy, and i think the fist thing to make clear is it's not really viable to have a concept of democracy that is only defined by majority vote elections. that's not really a viable concept of democracy. and i'll explain. i think you already have in mind

why which is simply a majority of our elections you can get a tyranny of the majority. in which the majority votes to do bad things to a minority. and that, and then we -- and if it's a really bad thing, we start feeling i'm comfortable calling that a democracy. you know, we have had that problem in our own history in the u.s. we called ourselves a democracy, but we had slavery. and i think some of the examples you're thinking of also have this ethnic dimension, there could be one majority group that is doing bad things to a minority group. and so, you know, i think we had to address that issue in our own history in the u.s. i think abraham lib con had the best with -- lincoln had the best answer to that. he said here's my definition of democracy. as i would not want to be a slave, i would not want to be a slave owner. he sort of recognized a sort of reciprocal bargain that would

emerge in democracy, that any minority group that is oppressed tomorrow, you know, you or i could be in that minority group that is oppressed. so once we start to recognize the rights of slave other thans, we give them -- owners, we give someone else such a right that we ourselves could one day be a victim. and so when everyone is sort of able to recognize that, behind the veil of ignorance any one minority group could wind with up being at the receiving end of majoritarian tyranny and be oppressed by majority, hen there's a next step that includes minority rights that really included individual rights. there's a certain minimum set of individual rights that cannot be violated by a democratic majority. and that's part of the definition of democracy. because otherwise we're in this kind of absurd world in which we were going to include, you know, if the hutus had a democratic goth and did the tutsi genocide, you know, we really don't want to call that a democracy.

we really don't want to call the u.s. with slavery a democracy. i think we need that broader definition to really get at the reality of what we're talking about. and really a benevolent system that forces government to be benever leapt and to not violate people's rights. that's the answer to part of the question that you're raising. the other big question you raised was the example of china. you know, i i was expecting that to come up somewhat earlier in this discussion. i'd actually written down finish. [laughter] it's sort of like one of the big questions that people want to talk about when we have debates on autocracy versus democracy. what about all those great things that have been done by those autocrats in china. specifically, deng chow ping. again, i would invite you to

think of that in not such a -- you know, we're a little bit behind in development that we sort of have this great man theory of history and development that has been pretty much rejected by every other social science including history itself. and now we think, you know, the old great man theory of history is history is just the biography of great men and what they do. the wonderful things or the pad things they do. bad things they do. i think there's alternative ways to think about china. again, why are we excited about china? it's because a very rapid economic growth rate. so the question we should be asking is not was the level of freedom good or bad in china to facilitate that growth rate, but was there a positive change in freedom that might have enabled that growth rate? an alternative way to think about chinañsod'ic=p is there'ss horrible tradition of autocracy, war lords and civil war, war with the japanese, toaltarian

sino -- totalitarian psycho named mao and the cultural revolution, and that had left china at a very low level of income. its personal then started to be released once you add a positive change towards greater political and economic freedom that happened after mao's regime. but there was certainly a large increase in economic freedom after mao. and even a increase in the political and personal rights of chinese people. they're certainly much better today than they were during the cultural revolution. so thinking of the change this freedom as something that makes rapid growth possible, that's sort of consistent with maybe free come is the -- freedom is the right story. the change in freedom maybe is consistent with the chinese autocratic success, what we're calling the authoritarian miracle of growth in china. so we either compare changes to changes in this freedom and growth rich, or we compare levels to levels. the level of awe tock rah is

city is, predicts a low level of development. well, that's still true in china. china is still at amount one-sixth or one-tenth of the u.s. income level. maybe the prediction is china really will have to embrace much more political rights if this growth is going to continue. otherwise it may be breaking down. i don't have great faith in my ability to predict that at any one moarntle when exactly that will happen. maybe it's already happening. but maybe that could be a prediction that viewpoint would make about the future of china. it's not going to -- [inaudible] also an increase in political freedom. >> okay. i think it's time to wrap up this discussion. i want to thank all the audience members for joining us today and for including in the discussion. please join me in thanking professor easterly for -- >> thank you very much. >> -- a wonderful presentation. >> thank you very much. [applause]