Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Tyranny Of Exp

Unemployment level not the sort of tag line unemployment level for what was lost to individuals throughout, and relative to the bailouts and the subsidies that have been given since, and doddfrank came along and did nothing remotely like dissecting speculation from depositors and traditional banking activities. A look at the relationships between 1600 pennsylvania avenue and wall street tonight at 10 eastern and sunday night at 9ben after words, part of booktv this weekend online. Next, New York University Professor William easterly talks about the failure of the United Nations and other organizations to reduce poverty since world war ii. It is from the Rand Corporation in santa monica, california. [ applause ] thank you so much for that warm inductitroduction. It is great to be here with you. I am going to talk about something that has unconsciously and indirectly led to a tyranny of experts. Lets call it an approach to Economic Development. The idea that poverty is a set of technical problems. So for malaria there is a variety of solutions one of them involves spraying chemicals on the inside of peoples walls that kill mosquitos. Another technical solution might be to convert land to higher value uses like food crops with low value to Forestry Products with high value. This purely technical approach seems so appealing and straightforward but might in fact not be quite that easy. Here is the story. This is not a happy story. This isnt like the dont think this is the run up for a punch line of the joke. This isnt the happy part of the talk. On the morning in february of 2010, a village in uganda were in church and they heard fun fire and came out and found men shooting their livestock and burning down their homes and keeping them from their homes and then the men with guns marched them away from their land. This happened in a World Bank Forestry project. The World Bank Forestry project was start today raise peoples income. It obviously didnt work out as intended. This is an extreme story and a horror story but some things are revealing what the book calls the forgotten rights of the poor. They are often neglected, ignored and for gotten. Two things that happened next, one is unlike any other rights violation that happen, this made it on the front page of the New York Times so you would have thought this led to a corrective response in this case. The world bank said they would do an investigation into what happened which sounded like the right response at the time. It has been four years and there hasnt been a world bank into what happened into its own action. That is the first non revealing event of the for gotten rights of the poor. The second is hardly anyone protest and the last thing is the story is forgotten by almost everyone except a few people paying attention on the out and, of course, the victims themselves. So you can not do what the world bank has always tried to do from its founding. The World Bank Articles have this clause in them that the World Bank Project shall be designed, loans shall be granted, intervention shall be made not taking into the account the political care of the government of the aid recipient and not considering the political stance of the government whether it is au autocratic or democratic. And economic considerations dont include the political character of the government and that is not something that could be hendering or helping Economic Development. This kind of separation is what i am calling the illusion that Technical Solutions can ignore the political situations in which they operate in. What are the consequences of this . Lets clear up a couple things first. Development isnt open about this, but it is partly a field that is making normal recommendations about how to make People Better off. And we too often forget in order to do thereat that you have to state your own values. I would consider this rights violation i just described. I would consider the rights of the poor that were violated, nar political right to protest what happened and their economic right property right they held over the land that was taken away. I myself would openly state the rights are good in and of themselves. That the principle of freedom of choice and consent of individuals is a value in and of itself. I dont want to say that moral statement automatically wins the argument for the right of the poor because there could be competing moral goods. But all i am saying is we cannot ignore the normative value. And that is the way the rights spread historically. People treat them good and they want them for themselves. And of course the second thing we have to consider is is the system based on political and economic rights and is it more likely to Foster Economic Development . Or is it maybe the reverse. Maybe you need an auto accura accurate autocrat to make the hard choices. Maybe people dont care about rights until they have a hire standard of needing and their materials are met. This is a debate we need to have. This isnt a normative debate. Do they make Economic Development happen or is autocracy a better system to make it happen . That is a debate we need to have in Economic Development. By having an approach like this we are not having this debate. This article is still in agreement so it isnt allowing it. The world bank isnt allowing its itself to talk about the autonomy. I have been following two World Bank Leaders and either one was openly used the word democracy in a speech. I was impressed the previous leader finished a five year term without saying the word democracy. And i talked to their spokesperson and they confirmed and said the president isnt allowed to use the world democracy and they said havent you article four, section 10. That is not an acceptable state of affairs. This article shouldnt be binding the operations of people that want to promote development and not binding the rest of us. We should be able to debate rather individual rights for the poor are a good thing for promoting development and the primary complaint of this book is that debate hasnt happened anywhere near enough or taken serious enough in Economic Development. Let me give you a little bit of history on the technocratic idea. Where did it come from . It is still being followed by a lot of people today. One fun thing authors get to do when writing a book is do reading in areas that turn out to be fun. And it was fun setting the idea of the history of technocratic ideas. It wasnt a new idea and it went deep back into colonial times. Here i am showing a Technical Report here. It is 1, 037 pages long. It reads like a United Nations report done in 2005. The u. N. Report was authored by an economist who is a professor at columbia. I think Angelina Jolie gave a consultant report for this. So take away that the tech technocratic solution of what is missing is the the technical solution doesnt fare well in this slide. These probs and solutions have been around for 70 years problems it is hard to argue that the problem was just a technical solution missing until the experts came along. It doesnt seem like the problem was a shortage of experts. It wasnt all that successful because we are talking about the same solutions 70 years later, almost 80 years later. The other way it is interesting is this approach formed 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 that the british was an inferior race and that language was become deadly by world war ii when they were in a fight for their live and wanted to offer a vision to colonials that wasnt insulting and racing and offered this justification. We will help you solve your material poverty with these long list of Technical Solutions. I think it helps to see the debate going on today in a time like this in a very different context. I will give you a little of that perspective. Another set of people the british had to convince with the technical colonialism and that is one of organizations the bank was being neutral about. It could not be considered in the World Bank Loan and World Bank Loans were made to colonial territory. I dont want to be unfair and tarnish todays ideas by having roots in colonialism but it helps to see the debate. The british had to convince the americans and lord haley found a way to convince the Roosevelt Administration to go along with the technocratic approaches because they we were doing the same to the africanamericans in the south. Roosevelt had lunch with a black leader named bunch and she said roosevelt needs to vote of white segregation to be reelected can you postpone your challenge and the new deal offers Technical Solutions to the black poverty in the United States. So thinking of that parallel helps us think about this debate. Fdr went along because they saw the parallel between colonialism and their black treatment. Material solutions to black poverty but not the right to end segregation or to vote. And after the end of colonialism, one thing you need to know, was the end of colonialism wasnt anticipated by anyone. It was a surprise it collapsed 15 years later. There were statements that the british expected their empire in african to endure for generations if not centuries. This was indefinite justification for the empire. After they collapsed, new parties found justification for authoritarian rule to be helpful. First there was the form called colonialistm that the technocratic justified and then a new set came on the scene. And they didnt want to give rights to their own citizens. They wanted to preplace the new empire that would justify their rules and let the autocrats be in power to solve material poverty. It used to be the define right of kings but in our day it became the development right of dictators. The United States was fairly happy about this because the autocrats make better allies than democrats during the cold war. So they were happy to support autocrats during the cold war. That is a wellknown story the United States supported the autocrats during the cold war. I am suggesting you add the idea that justified autocrats had a political motivation. This story isnt only historical, but today we in a similar situation to the cold war the war on terror. In which the United States Foreign Policy implementers are happy with autocrats. And these apply to the development agencies, the experts, and they make the operation of aid much easier t that you can ignore the government and focus on Technical Solutionst. That has a direct appeal that never goes away. There is one doctor you may have heard of named william gates, jr. Bill gates . Ring a bell. He said in 2012, the dictator in ethopia made Real Progress in helping the people of ethope. He said they followed this approach they had set clear goals, choosing approaches, measuring results and using those measurements to define our approach. This helps us so there is this unwitting or maybe witting kind of coalition with the autocratic donors Work Together with the ethopian autocrat, helps us deliver tools to everyone who benefits. N now, bill gates was excited because the country had had a few years of good growth which he gave the credit malice and then also in infant mortality. Lets talk about how much we have this debate on positive rights versus autocracy. He is siding with the fact that it is good or neutral for development. People are also looking for autocratic Success Stories within the developing countries or if you challenge that way want democratic Success Stories from the countries. There is one thing going on throughout the history of development and that looking for possible models on how to succeed at development, we have excluded the cases of those who actually succeeded. This is important. Let me repeat that. In having any debate about how to succeed about development, we exclude those who actually succeeded. We excluded north america, australia, japan, western europe, and joined by other Success Stories within the developing countries that had greater political and Economic Freedom. But the exclusion of the history of develop is the strange thing that excluded all of those successes. That shows you something in the way in this this debate hasnt been happening enough that we would treat the evidence in such a strong way and bill gates celebrates a few years of apparent success which is automatically without further evidence giving credit to mellis sunowe and not reflecting the long history of democracy and development. Another bit of direct evidence is when you see something good happening in a country there is a tendency to infer the leader is a good guy because good things are happening. That is a strong tendency. Even if you have evidence the leader isnt a good guy. So he was showing democratic behavior in a number of ways over the years. His Security Forces had killed peaceful demonstrators in the street after rigged elections in 2005. He manipulated famine relief to others on the other side and he was caught but it was the same situation a promise to investigate, then no investigation happened and no protest. And there is a village forestry settlement and another rights violation financeedby the world bank. And there is another person who was sentenced to 18 years in jail for unlike the president of the world bank he did use the world democracy in his blogs and for that crime, of which he was innocent, that crime is now serving 18 years in prison in ethopia. The illusion we can ignore the rights of the poor is what i am protesting here. I think we have to have this debate. We have been talking about development for very long and this debate hasnt happened. It is like everyone is happy with the technocratic ideas. At the time of the debate i showed you there was a comment of the british secretary on how well lord haley did justifying the British Empire, how happy the americans were with technocratic development and how happy everybody was. This was a colonial secretary image during world war ii. This is excellent. They work for everyone. Makes Foreign Policy easier because our National Security interest and our Development Interest can be complimentary. If we think they are good allies in the war on terror and supporting them with aid and praise accomplishs killing two birds with one stone. If we had an inconvenient idea that autocrats were the problem then we would be in a much more difficult situation of having a tradeoff of whatever we thing we are doing on the National Security sides supporting allies by the way, both are major allies and supportive of the United States military command in africa and have served in u. N. Peace keeping troops and the war on iraq ever in the case of uganda. Things become more much difficult if we have really the idea that rights are not only a good thing in and of themselves but they are the way that poverty ends. That becomes more much difficult. And so many of you like i did for 16 years are actually involved in Development Efforts or aspire to be in Development Aid efforts and so you want to see the closing power point slide everyone has with the five bullet points to operational devices in foreign aid. Let me get to that slide. I dont have one. I have done something here which has gotten me into trouble and probably get me into more trouble. I have tviewpoint we have to ge principles right before we talk about operations. It isnt a lack of five bullet aid policies. It as a lack of agreement on the basic principles of whether we should have approached development that is like the same way the United States development with a high degree and growing degree of individuals economic and Political Rights or do we in fact support an authoritarian view . That debate hasnt happened enough and until we have that debate and agree on what the principles should be i am not giving policy recommendations about implementing rights and aid when people are not convinced that rights to matter and at the center of it. First we have to do the convinces and then we will opationalize the principles. Lets go back to the blacks and whites in america. There is a different way we could think about this and it helps if you think about it in a context of the United States history. The Civil Rights Movement that happened in the 1960s, Martin Luther king and many other black leaders come along, and there are advocating for change that is at the level of principles that is saying the principles that blacks and whites should have equal rights isnt being recognized within the south. The rights battle has to be won first, and then well talk about operationalizing. So i know thats a point of view that is not goi