Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Tyranny Of Experts 20140427

And indirectly led to a tyranny of exports. Lets call it that technocratic approach to Economic Development it is the idea that poverty is really just a set of technical problems. For example, from malaria there are a variety of Technical Solutions. One of them is bring at chemical called pyrethrum on the walls of peoples houses, on the inside of walls. That is a solution. Helps fight malaria. Another technical solution might be to convert land to higher value uses like food scraps that have low value to the great products that have higher value. Now let me tell you why the technical approach seems so appealing, so straightforward, so uncontroversial, might in fact be not quite ready. Here is the story. This is not a happy story. This is not like do not think of this has the runup to the punch line to a joke. I will try to work some and later, but this is not the happy part of the talk im afraid. On the morning of that urey 28, 2010, the villagers of that the gun that district or in church. They heard the sound of gunfire outside, and they came out and found that men with guns were burning down their homes and torching their crops, shooting their livestock, and keeping them at gunpoint from rescuing their burning homes, and in the men with guns marched them away at gunpoint. 20,000 farmers lost their land. This happens in the guise of a World Bank Forestry project. The World Bank Forestry project was designed as a technical solution to income. Obviously it did not work out as intended. A couple of additional things that this is obviously an extreme story, or story, and i couple of things are somewhat revealing of what this book calls the forgotten rights of the poor. The poor are so often neglected, ignored, forgotten. So two things happen next. One is, unlike many other Rights Violations that happened, this one actually made it on to the front page of the new york times. You would have thought that would have led to some kind of corrective response. The world bank on twitter the next day said they would do a investigation into what had happened which sounded like the right response of the time. It has now been four years, and theres never been a world Bank Investigation into what happened that was the first non event and revealing of the for gun rights of the port. The second non event, hardly anyone protested. And the last thing that is revealing is that the story is a truly forgotten by almost everyone except a few people paying attention on the outside and, of course, the victims themselves. So the story, you cannot do with the world bank has always tried to do. It from its very founding of World Bank Articles of agreement have this clause in the. The World Bank Project shall be designed, loans, granted, interventions shall be made, not taking into account the political character of the governments or the aid recipient, not considering the political character of the government, whether it is an autocracy, men with guns, influence project or whether it is a democratic government that recognizes political and economic rights. And the world bank seems to have the illusion that something called economic considerations can be separated out and that economic considerations somehow 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 kind of separation is what im calling the technocratic approach of the government, the illusion that Technical Solutions can ignore the political system in which they operate. And it the consequences of this, well, first lets get a couple of things clear. One is that development is not always very open about this, but partly a field that is making recommendations. End we too often forget that in order to make normative recommendations you have to state your own normative values. For example, i personally would consider this Rights Violations that i just described in an of itself. I would consider the rights that were violated, but political right to protest what happened to them and their economic right that is the property right that they held over the land that was taken away from them. I myself would openly say to those rights in and of themself, the principle of freedom of choice and consent of individuals, value in and of itself. No, i dont want to kind of play it fast and very and save it the moral statement automatically wins the arguments for the right of the poor because there could be other competing moral good. Maybe there is a tradeoff with some other morally good thing that we are trading off. All im saying is, we cannot ignore the normative value of the rights of the poor. The rights of the port in and of themselves which is primarily the way rights have spread historically. People treat them as something good in of itself that they want for themselves. Of course, the second thing we have to consider is ours is a system based on political and economic rights isnt more likely to foster Economic Development for maybe it is the reverse. You need an autocrat to implement Economic Development to make the hard choices. Maybe people dont care about their rights until there is some higher standard of living, their material means have already been met. This is a debate that we need to have, and this one is not its a policy debate. Economic development happens or is, in fact, autocracy a better system . That is the debate that we need to have on Economic Development. And what has happened is that by making statements like this, having it technocratic approach to development, we are not openly having that debate. The world bank is not alone in that debate to happen. It is the world bank is not even allowing itself to open the talk about the issue of democracy or autocracy. In fact, i have been following the past two World Bank President s. Neither one has ever openly used the word democracy in a speech. Theyre for five years. He managed a 05year term without ever using the word democracy. Just to make sure was not missing anything i talked to the World Bank Press spokesman, and thus press spokesman confirmed to me that he said, the president is not allowed to use the word democracy. Havent you Read World Bank article for section ten . You know, that is not an acceptable state of affairs. Not binding the operations of people who want to provoke development. It should not be binding the rest of us. We should be able to open the debate over democracy, individual rights for the poor. The primary complaint of this book is that that debate has not happened anywhere near enough let me give you a little bit of history on the technocratic idea where did it come from and how has it held on so long . This article eyes never been changed, and the technocratic approach is being called today. Some say that authors get to do research for books, reading in areas that turn out to be fun. One area that turned out to be fun for me was the history of the idea of technocratic development. One thing i found is that it is not a new idea. We actually went back deep into colonial times. Here i am showing a technocratic report that was done in 1938 by the British Colonial Office Officer named lord healy did this report. 1,837 pages long. A very long list of Technical Solutions to poverty in africa which reads remarkably like the United Nations report that was done in 2005. The u. N. Report was authored by an economist who is a professor at columbia whose name i cannot remember right now. I think angelina jelly supplied a consultant report. The only thing i want to take away from the slide is that the technocratic idea that what is missing is the technical solution does not fare too well. These particular problems and Technical Solutions have been around for 70 years. So it is hard to argue that the problem was just that the Technical Solutions were missing until the experts come along. It does not seem like the problem. We have had experts for 70 years. Apparently not all that successful because we are still talking about the same solutions 70 years later, now almost 80. The other way in which this history is interesting is this technocratic approach actually form a lot of the justification for the British Empire by the time of world war ii. The old justification for the British Empire was openly racist, the british were a superior race. That kind of language was becoming critically kind of deadly by the time of world war ii. The British Empire was in a fight for its life and wanted to offer a more benevolent vision to colonial subjects of was not so openly insulting and racist. So it offered this technocratic justification. Were the people who are going out to solve your Material Party with these long lists of Technical Solutions. I think that it helps to kind of see the debate today, when we see this same debate going on in a time like this in a very different context. Let me give you a little bit of that kind of protest perspective. Another set of people had to convince that technocratic justifications for colonialism by the way, colonialism was one of the regimes that the world bank was being neutral about. Not only dictatorship, fascism, communism, also colonialism was considered a political character that could not be considered in a world bank loan, and there were some world bank loans to colonial territories of the british and french. Theyre is a colonial mentality at that time that, i dont want to be unfair and tarnish todays ideas. That is unfair, but it helps us see what the issues are. One easy way that lord he lee found, he was very shrewd and kick found a way to convince the Roosevelt Administration to go along with the technocratic justification. The Roosevelt Administration was taking the same technocratic approach to one of their internally underdeveloped regions and peoples which were africanamericans in the south. Eleanor roosevelt had lunch. Look, you know, roosevelt, i dont think he needs the votes of racing segregationists. Can you please post bonior challenged segregation. In the meantime, the new deal will offer a technocratic solution to the material poverty of black people in the United States. Thinking of that parallel helps us think about this debate. In the end fdr went along because they saw the parallel between colonialism and their own treatment of blacks, material solutions, but not rights, not the right to end segregation, not the right to vote. What happened after the end of colonialism, one thing now was in a story, the end of colonialism was not anticipated by anyone during world war ii. It was really a surprise collapse. There were statements that i could show you. The british expected their empire in africa to endure for generations, if not centuries. This was indefinite justification. But what happened after colonialism did collapse, a new set of parties found technocratic justifications for authoritarian rule to be very helpful. First authoritarian rule called colonialism that technocratic idea is justified. In a new set of autocrats came on the scene, the indigenous autocrats and africa. They found it they did not want to give rights to their own citizens either. They wanted to replace the empire as being the new autocrats that could justify their own rule with technocratic ideas. Autocrats be in power so that we can solve material poverty. They used to be the divine right of kings in medieval times. In our day after the end of colonialism and became the development right of dictators. It really justified dictators. The u. S. Was also happy about this because autocrats make better allies than democrats do during the cold war. So the u. S. When it started getting into Development Economics during the cold war, a very wellknown story, the new angle im suggesting you had is that the nt is that justified the autocrats also have political motivation. The story we are in a new situation that is somewhat analogous. Again, the u. S. As Foreign Policy apparatus, implemented the or someone happy with ideals that justify autocrats. Hes also appeal lastly about the development agencies, development experts, philanthropists because these ideas make the operation of philanthropy and a much easier. You can, again, ignore, as the world bank did, the character of the government youre dealing with an focus directly on Technical Solutions, the direct appeal that never goes away. There is one philanthropist you may have heard of named William Gates jr. Bill gates. Bring about . Okay. He said in 2012 that a dictator in ethiopia had, made Real Progress in helping the people of ethiopia. Bill gates said that the donors working on their technocratic Solutions Together with the government have followed this approach, set, cleared legal clear goals, choosing an approach to measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach which helps us on wedding or may be wedding kind of coalition that the autocratic government. Daughters, philanthropists, experts working together. Helps us to deliver tools and services to everybody will benefit. Now, bill gates was partly enthusiastic because ethiopia have had a few years of good growth. And there were also a few years of measured reductions in child mortality, which he again give the credit for. Now, lets talk of a bit about how much the Development Community has had this debate on the positive value of autocracy. In giving that credit theyre seems to be factual sightings on the idea of autocracy being good one of the strange things about the debates is people always are looking either for autocratic Success Stories within the developing country or if you challenge that they want you to provide a democratic success story. There is one very strange thing that has been going on off the route the history of development , and that is looking for possible models for how to succeed it development. Excluded the cases of all those who actually succeeded. This is pretty important. Let me repeat that. Having any debate about how to succeed in development, the models of those who have actually succeeded. A very strange way to handle evidence. They excluded not america, australia, new zealand, japan, western europe, recently joined by other Success Stories within the developing countries that had greater political and Economic Freedom. The strange thing is the exclusion of the history of developments that excluded all the successes. That shows you something in the ways in which this debate has really not been happening enough that we would treat the evidence in such a strange way and celebrate bill gates would celebrate just a very few years of apparent success which is automatically giving credit and not reflecting this long history of success of democracy and development. Of course, one of a bit of direct evidence is when you see something good happening in a country there is always a tendency to infer that the leader must be a good guy because good things are happening. That is a strong tendency. Even if you have direct government with a leader is not such a good guy. So kind of showing his autocratic credentials in a variety of ways for a number of years prior to bill gates statement. His Security Forces had killed peaceful demonstrators in the streets after regulations in 2005, manipulated famine relief in the year 2010. Only willing support the Party Supporters in the night to the opposition. Again, sort of this the same sequence are describing the gone up. A promise to investigate, and then the investigation was acquired the canceled and never happened. And, you know, the abuses continue. In 2012 there is forest militarization Program Within ethiopia, again another rights violation financed by the world bank. There is also 18 years in jail for online president wellliked of the world bank he did use the word democracy. For that crime is now serving 18 years in prison in ethiopia. So the a version that we can ignore their rights of the poor is what i am protesting against your. I really think that we have to have this debate. We have been talking about development for so long, and this debate has not happened. It is like everyone is happy with these technocratic ideas. At the time of the colonial debate, i forgot to show you this slide, a common by the British Colonial secretary on how well or david haley had done, our happy americans were with technocratic development, how happy everybody was. This was an actual copy i found on the internet of the colonial secretary during world war ii. This technocratic idea is their word for everyone. The experts, the aid agencies, the autocrats, Foreign Policy. Also it makes it easier because i nationalsecurity interest and development interests can be complementary. If we think autocrats are good allies in the war on terror and are good for development, then supporting autocratic Development Aid accomplishes kills two birds with one stone. That is wonderful. If we had is inconvenient idea that autocrats are not the solution but are actually the problem, an obstacle to development, a much more difficult situation by having a trade of. By the way, both ethiopia and uganda our major allies. They both are very supportive of the u. S. Military command in africa. Have served in you in peacekeeping groups, the war in a raw iraq. So everything is much easier. Things that become much more difficult if we had the idea that rights are not only good thing and of themselves, but also the way that property, that rub becomes much more difficult. And so many of you, like i did for 16 years, are actually involved in Development Efforts or aspire one day to be involved in Development Efforts. So you want to see the club to closing power point slide. Five bullet points on out operational lives each principles, and played. Let me give immediately to that slide. [laughter] i dont have one. I have done something here which has already got me into a lot of trouble and probably will more today. I have a theoretical viewpoint that we have to give principals right before we talk about operational rising anything. What has not happened, it is not a lack of operational recommendations, a lack of policy. It is a lack of agreement on basic principles of whether we should have involved, a high degree a high and growing degree of recognition of individual economic and Political Rights or do we, in fact, support and authoritarian development. That is the debate that has not happened enough and that i want to happen. And so until that happens, until we have that debate and agree on what the principles should be am not going to give policy recommendations of implementing rights and age when people are not convinced that rights to matter and are at the center. First we have to do the convincing, and then we will operational as the principles. Think about this a little bit. Lets go back to the example of american blacks to clarify our thinking about this. Theyre is a different way that we could be thinking about this. It helps to think about it in the context of u. S. History. The Civil Rights Movement that happened in the 1960s, there is advocacy for change at the level of principles saying the principle that blacks and whites should have equal rights is not being recognized within the segregated south. Until that principle is recognized and then it was not about, you know Martin Luther king when he said things like, i have a dream that one day people will be free at last. Its very nice, but have you operation allies with health and Human Service policies . You know, that kind of question would have just been an excuse to avoid the debate about the facts. Think of it another way, if there had been a Foreign Aid Program that supplied George Wallace the support for is segregationist regime in alabama and we object to that because it was, in fact, financing material welfare projects to improve the wellbeing of blacks in alabama. We object to that because George Wallace had fundamentally the wrong principle, segregationists principles in which blacks and whites were not equal. The white battle has to be one first. And so i know that is a point of view that is not going to help you do your job if you are working in development, but i hope is a point of view that will open your mind to things that indirectly will help you. Addressing their roots of poverty, we need not just the right operations but the right principles, we need to get the principles right. As not been happening. Fundamentally we are not the level where we really, really do care enough about the rights of the port of we would protest when there are Rights Violations in uganda, Rights Violations in other places. And so that is the debate that must happen and is happening around the world now. [ applause ] so we will now take some questions. Doctor, your analysis of the world 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. You have wide experience in this matter. I am going to talk from my own experience of working on a coupleal projects i was involved with in the last year. A lot are funded by the world bank. One was on urbanization in pakistan. The mandate was to explicitly look at the rights of the poor. And that is how we framed our analysis so we looked at transportation within cities in pakistan. We looked at how they should be structured so the lifestyle might change that link the poor with the mainstream. And the world bank was happy with that analysis. Another example was looking at trade in south asia. The political economy and a key aspect of that analysis was to look at how trade could benefit across Border Regions and that was an explicit focus of the studies and i am wondering and when i tell you is the world bank changing or am i looking at it differently . Thank you for that question. That is very good. There are efforts within them to do things to try to give poor people more right, spread democracy. There are words like empowerment and i guess this debate is happening at a larger level than that. Because it is like the world bank a split approach that is strong and a somewhat unclear way in which all of these words that sound good are actually the same thing as what i am talking about which is fundamentally a political system that is democratic and which the leaders of the country are democratically accountable to the system and elect leaders that respond to them and reject leaders that dont. So the macrolevel the world bank cant talk about and then there is there smaller level at which these levels are happening and i am sorry, forgive me for being a contrary, but some of these slogans are so vague they are committing and they know the issue is threatening and divisive and dangerous that there is a reason for the vagueness of these phrases like empowerment and participation and in fact another bit of colonial history is these words have been used for decades going back to colonial times. Participation has been a favorite word of the colonial and aid establishments for decades. So the vagueness is necessary. And i want to get across here i am not saying anyone of these are bad people. They are politically constrained people. They are constrained by politics. And these little efforts can never constitute any threat to the rule of the autocratic regimes that dont react to the poor. So that is how a split effort is challenging the denial of rights to the poor. Given these political constraints, i think people are trying to do the best that can be done. I agree with that. Certainly. Therefore, you think there is no feedback from whatever little is being done in development. An example is what Milton Freedman did in chile and people vilified him but he said improving Economic Freedom in chile led to prolitical freedom. So you think there is no reverse feedback from whatever Little Development we can do back into the rights and Political Freedom . I am glad you raised this chile example. I think there is a view among some sort of free market economist almost like the ordeal situation is to have a free autocratic market that will ram through the kind of free market reforms you need and after that you can that democracy once you guarantee the free market reforms stick in chile. I dont think that generalizes to any kind of recommendation i would be happy with. It sounds like another justification for an autocrat. You can have the justification for one that does the free market reforms, the technical solution you want but it is always outside experts like freedman who is one of them i would say because he wasnt just being an economist. But they try to force these on other societies and it leads to backlash other than success as it did in chile. I think what is missing in that is a more unified respect for both the political and economy rights of the poor and freedman and cannot be split apart. You cannot say you want Economic Freedom but not political. People dont separate rights in that way. And there is no evidence that it is difficult enough to get body of evidence on the competing stories of democracy versus autocracy. I think we are stuck with general statements that we have to chose on which side is the relative evidence heavier. Democratic or autocratic. And what the transition path looks like we dont want to veto anything. It will happen the way it happens. It will be uneven but there is no sense where outsiders can engineer that. I reject that hypothesis of not being based on any solid body of evidence. I am a student here and i dont have experience in developing countries you are not one of the bad experts. The way i am defining bad experts doesnt include anyone in the room at the moment. But something that i know is that it is difficult to define what is a good democracy. You gave us an example of where it seems clear that is not a democracy. But the majority of cases we dont know if this is good or bad. Only extreme cases are easy to define. I got confused by your presentation let me try to unconfuse you. Hopefully. Yeah. Now i think what should we do with this whole middle where we dont know if they are good or bad . Yeah, yeah. Well, i think a couple things to clear up and i am not saying you need to have a utopian before anything happens. That is not what i am saying. You need idea that all men are created equal and poor people deserve rights just as much as rich people and specific violations of those rights by the agencies themselves should be protested because part of our advocating for development includes rights. So i am not saying there is a utopian things where you can flip a switch. I am just offering an ideal that i think hasnt been embraced enough by the development. It is as if development is 99 about the material deprivation of the poor people. And thi am saying lets rebalan. Rights in and of themselves are a good thing. We should not talk whether the rights work like excluding rich county cases. I am saying lets have that debate and get those principles straight. That is then a guide toward how development happens which is by an ever degree of growing economic and Political Rights. Just like the u. S. History. It wasnt like in 1776 when the u. S. Was at half the level of africa with income and a low level of education and there were statements with rights. All men are created equal. These rights were being violated by slavery, the lack of womens rights and we have been on a journey in which that ideal has been accepted enough that that ideal itself has been a huge engine of social change and that is the idea im trying to get across. The principle were as they were in the civil rights example. Principles are an engine of social change. Much more so than the five bullet points that will be for gotten by everyone about how they are to operationalize. The question is what direction are they going and what is desirable. Everyone is in between. But what is the destination and it should be every growing political and economic rights. Hi, i am not one of the experts either. Great. I am with you on the rights issues. But i am wondering in selling this approach if we would call into the same rhetorical rights like the language right and participation freedom and there is a correlation with the former colonial masters. I dont know if you have seen similar things. You mention empowerment and the preoccupation of rights and those for their own agenda would they that is a western colonial itself. And how would you address, you know, that kind of a concern if folks try to pose this argument again as a north and south and colonial versus non are you saying that western advocates of rights might have their own agenda and they try to impose on the rest of the world . Is that what you are saying . Are you asking me to consider that . I am saying how do you respond to that critique that it is probably selfinterested. Yeah, so, let me Say Something big and philosophical first and then talk about the critique. As economist or advocates for social change we have a split personality. We are studying the political economy in this case of ideas. And i think that is not something that is studied enough and i am trying to talk about more here than it usually is. That is something that gives us insight and might give us something useful that we understand that ideas are not just things that people assert for their own reasons but they have a political agenda. But at the same time, you know, at a philosophical level we want to appeal outside that system where political interest determines what part of the i deals and we want to appeal to natural law that we believe in of what rights should look like and what we believe are good principles. We do that all of the time in ec econmics. We might consider the political economy of Economic Policy and recognize that the Economic Policy is what it is not because of the merits of the policy but because of a Political Alliance that led to that policy. And we have the ability to step outside that and say we think this is a bad policy for such and such reasons. And they are central and elementary principles often like those i am talking about today. So we are always in that split view. We recognize the political contraints but try to step out and change them by appealing to peoples sense on what is a good thing. That will change the con and they will care more about the d d de deprivation of the poor and that will shift from National Security and development into a c constructive way in that there is a tradeoff if you feel you need to support on autocrat that is bad for the other country. One thing i resist in a lot that has been tormenting me through my career is this insistence we cannot talk about undering the Way Development happens, understanding the world of development. We cannot spend enough time talking about the principles. Even when they are simple principles of how development happens. Any Development Discussion seems like there is an imperative that it has to lead within the first three minutes to an aid policy and that prohibits us from having these debates but they are happening in the rest of the world. I am checking my ipad everythievery minute to see if russia has invaded ukraine yet. We are in a big battle. We do a disservice if we as Development Economist think we are not involved in that battle and have a contribution. We have several more questions in santa monica and i will turn to those joining us remotely but until then please mute your microphone so we dont get interference. So, one of the main principles is this idea that all men are created equal and all citizens of the United States are created equal. And it has been achieved at a great cost in the u. S. But if you move that and you take it seriously to the next step on a global stand, and you look at the cost, that simple principle to the United States and for us a homogenious population and we love to say all people are equal but crossing the border in any direction it goes by 0. 0001. I am saying it is costly. And that might be why you dont have the debate. Sure. I guess the big counter example to what you are saying is people do seem to care a lot about the material poverty of those outside the United States. Not when i say a lot that means generous helping by bono, madonna and angelina jolie. But there is a lot of public debate, books and columns given in efforts to relieve material poverty around the world. I take that as a benchmark of caring. I will trying to say i wish we could change that kind of caring into something that i think it is more respectful of how poor people look at the problem. And this goes back is this something the west is imposing on their rights of the poor people. And i dont think that is true. There are poor people that want rights and dignity to be respected and i think as our obligations, we respect that and offer them an approach of aid and development and discussions to the problems of poor people. It doesnt treat poor people as t t passive bundles of needs that are not being met but as d dignified human rights and that is changing the direction of recognizing rights and not just material needs. Hello. You drew a difference between millton freedman and his role as a Development Policy and academic economist and i think many of them draw this line and many worked on these as well like my friend here and others on Political Representation of women. It seems that sometimes those efforts gets ignored. So in advancing the debate on right. So how do you get policy makers to listen to evidence . And that is a pretty big question. If you have evidence how do you get it paid attention to. And there is a notable exception in the Development Community that accepted this debate as complete and i am thinking of the millennial challenge group and they withdraw funding even when negative things occur. Is that the ideal outcome and perhaps this is too far into operational things we have already. But what is your response to the Millennial Challenge Corporation . I think it was founded on good principles. And some eruption of the need of these kinds of principles. The only reason i am not jumping up and down and saying this is the solution and that all of the bad autocrats were assigned to u usad. They would take the bad guys. And you know, yes, about the academic economist. A lot do accept these principles and this would be unoriginal 101 if this was a purely academic conversation we were having. I think there is a phrase i had about another set of principles that could apply to this situation. They are simple but not easy. It is simple to understand but not easy to figure out what you do with them. The role of the economic economist is to stay clear and make sure the audience that is the applied Development Community, the relevant experts, who think they are in charge of development in a sense. There is a sort of tyranny of experts. They think that the World Bank Experts apply the solutions and that is the way it happens and bill gates is addressing that view and quote that i gave. That community doesnt accept these academic insights into rights and good institutions as being the bases of developments. They think what they are doing is development and i am not it is undevelopment. Are there any questions in washington, d. C. . Pittsburgh . Hello, pittsburgh . Earth, more generally. Okay. Now, there is some who allege that even talking about things like political and economic rights and freedom are western constructs. How would you combat that and respond to that . It would be interesting to see who is making those claims. Are they being made by autocr s autocrats . We might want to discount their views by having a little bit of selfinterest in how that view comes out. You know, the reality is it is very difficult to go around and rigorously establish what the views of the poor people are. I can give you inspirational quotations, i can refer to surveys that have been done by very good people and went around and interviewed lots of poor people and generated a lot of statements of them saying they do want rights. One statement was man in uganda saying why cant i do what i want with my own cow . They want the right to run their own lives and their make own chases. If you want the eloquent version the bloger in ethopia said we need to recognize that rights are not a western virtue. They are an aspiration for others. And others are willing to lay their lives on the line to fight for greater rights in china and ethhp and other places. Isnt the attempt by the outside forces to inject democratic principles into an autocratic culture just another form of Democratic Solutions and specifically refer to the 40 or so countries in subsaharian african and many outside forces with no successes except for short glimpses. So if autocratic cult is resistant to external forces creating democratic principles arent we dealing with the same solutions that bear no results . It depends on what you nene by an autocratic culture. You know, an autocratic system in which an autocratic challenges someone we are not sure whether it is a culture or oppre oppressive autocratic system. As far as the values themselves, the values are people cant openly espouse Democratic Values in public when they are threatened with torture. I think that is the cohersion there. Ghana has been successful. You can think of the denial of economic rights by people abadeing the controls of the state and brutal repression of the cocoa possessional. And later there was a Democracy Movement that was successful. If you look at the big trends and i want to be clear the trends are at a greater level of Economic Freedom. We had the fall of the berlin wall and we had what was the unbroken rule of military dictators in latin america and now they are much more democratic. And we had africa change from an assortment of awful autocratics to either ones that are not quite so horific or even democracy. So i think there is progress and that is one hopeful think i want to make clear. We are talking about ad vovocat for democrat principles that are winning in the long run. We are winning this battle. There is hope. We are not talk about a hopeless cause that is phase facing impossible odds. We are on the side history is going in. Thank you very much for your presentation and as a ukrainian thank you for your support and what you do here about my home country and my question is about the tyranny of experts and what is the role of razz the mass media in this in the rest of the world. It seems to me it is everywhere. And so what would you say about that. Well, of course freedom of the press is an important israel in and of itself and an important way in which positive social change happens. Both positive social change toward more democracy and in and of itself being a democratic correction mechanisms. The mass media that could be focused in a few hands and subject to bribery by the political authorities, there is a hopefully trend with the rise of social media, bloging, tweeting and facebook that there is more freedom of the press available through the nontraditional kinds. If you want to ing think of an example of this leading to prevention of abuse long in uganda. Think of the thing close to me. I live in new york city and a concern new jersey governor supposedly created a traffic jam on a bridge. He paid a mibig price and that freedom of the press in action. The ability of the press to comment on that. Your concern is media can be bribed. When there is freedom of the press i think it is a positive force for change. [inaudible question] yeah, i am glad you say that because it makes it clear that a benevolent dictator and makes it clear if they exist or not. It isnt a strawman and it is a real debate we need to have. The cases you mentioned have an increase in Economic Freedom and the credit is given to the autocratic in power. I think this isnt all that clear that we should make that attribution. I think even more than poPolitical Rights Political Rights there is a way in which people resist the denial of their economic rights by trying to evade the controls that are put on them. This is sort of Resistance Movement that is involved in people switching from the formal sector to the Informal Sector and trying to hide Economic Activities from the state and i think we should think of that as a combination of a ruler who is going to go along with Economic Reforms which could indeed by the case in some cases. But we should also recognize the possibility that the ruler is forced to go along with those Economic Reforms. I think Jerry Rollings my First World Bank mission was to ghana in 1985. It was meaningful to me because i lived in ghana before that as a teenager. Whether i arrived in 85 when i it was striking what bad shape ghana was in in 1985. There was a since in which rollings had no choice. The economy hit rock bottom. There was talk he shopped around to many banks. Lets use cocoa. He taxed cocoa so much that cocoa disappeared. The was virtually no cocoa exports in ghana and nothing left to opress and that forced him to accept the resistant had won. The resistance that refused to go along with having their rights violated with producing cocoa where all of the profits went to the state and they starved. They refused to do that and they won. Rollings was forced to concede that they can produce in a way where they can keep more of the reedwards of the were introduction. Rewards and that is not just a guy saying i need to do these because it is good things. It is a combination of these. I am not an expert yet. But my question is regarding what you call democracy. First of all, is there a definition because everyones definition seems to be different. Even within the same country. In the middle of the my country, in the northern and southern part is different. Which country are you from . West africa. In that debate that you talk about democracy so what is your view of democracy and the western world view might be different than the view of subsahara or Northern Africa even so how do you get into talking that and knowing that we have multiple views of it. And second to that what do you think for instance of china . I am not saying they are perfect. But they have about 400 million to 600 million out of poverty. So do we need democracy and what kind when you think about countries in the medieval time and i dont think they were not considered democracy where they were really looting their own citizens. So how do we grapple at these ideas and try to solve that puzzle . So, first of all, on the definition of democracy. I think each Society Needs to evolve their own ideas and norms. But i think there are certain sets of common problems when we talk about democracy. It isnt viability to have a democracy that is only defined by majority vote elections. You can get a tyranny of the majority in which the majority vote to do bad things to a minority. If is really bad we start saying we are comfortable calling it a democracy. We had that problem in the United States. We called ourselves a democracy but had slavery and we had to address that and lincoln had the best answer saying i would not want to be a slave so i would not want to be a slave owner. He recognized a reciprocal bargain that would emerge in democracy that any Minority Group that is oppressed tomorrow you can or i could be in that Minority Group that is oppressed. So we give someone else a right that we could be a victim one day. When everyone is able to recognize that and behind the fail of ignorance that any one minority could be at the end of the tyranny and be oppressed by a majority then there is the next step that includes individual rights. There is a minimum set of individual rights that can not be violated by a democratic majority and that is part of the definition of demomeracy. Otherwise we are in the world where if it the hutus and the tutus had that they would be a democracy. So we need the broader definition to get at the reality of what why talking about and this is a benevolent system that forces the government to be that way and not violate the peoples rights. That is the answer to part of the question you are raising. The other big question was the example of china. I was expecting this to come up earlier in this discussion. I have it written down here and it is sort of like one of the big question people want to talk about when we have debates on autocray and democracy. And the hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And i would invite you to think of that we are a little behind in development that we have a great man theory in development that has been rejected by every other social science, including history itself. And we think that history is a biography of great men and the wonderful things or the bad things they do. I think there is alternative ways to think about china. Why are we excited about china . Because of a 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. There was a horrible long tradition of autocracy for centuries of the chinese empire and warlords and war with the japanese and mao with the great famine and cultural revolution and that left china not meeting their potential but that changed after they got freedom and maos regime was over. There was an increase in freedom and political and and personal rights of the chinese people. They are much better today than they during the cultural reblutire revolution. And that is consistent with maybe change in freedom is consistent with what we are calling the growth of china. And we compare changes to changes in this freedom and growth and we compare levels to levels. The level of autocracy predicts a low level of development. China is at 1 6 of the American Income level. Maybe china will have to embrace growth rights if this continues. Otherwise it might be breaking down. I dont have the ability to predict when that will happen. It isnt going to continue the rapid growth unless it extends to also an increase in political freed freedom. I think it is time to wrap up and i want to thank the audience members for joining us and please join me in thanking professor easterly for a wonderful presentation. Thank you very much. [ applause ] interested in American History . Watch American History television on cspan tv. 48 hours of people and events that document the american story. Visit our website for more information. Booktv covers hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long. Here is a look at some of events we will attend this week look for the programs to air in the near future. We are in princeton, new jersey on tuesday for the count of of lines of