William Easterly > Quotes

“When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging.”
― William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

“Remember, aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development base on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that.”
― William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

“The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights. The emphasis on the problem of expertise makes the problem of rights worse. The technical problems of the poor (and the absence of technical solutions for those problems) are a symptom of poverty, not a cause of poverty. This book argues that the cause of poverty is the absence of political and economic rights, the absence of a free political and economic system that would find the technical solutions to the poor’s problems. The dictator whom the experts expect will accomplish the technical fixes to technical problems is not the solution; he is the problem.”
― William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

“Any factor that breeds polarization will worsen policy, and thus cause lower growth.”
― William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

“... money should not be spent according to what the West considers the most dramatic kind of suffering.”
― William Easterly

“To escape the cycle of tragedy, we (searchers) have to be tough on the ideas of the planners, even while we salute their goodwill.”
― William Easterly

“Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, adjusted for purchasing power.5 Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don’t have enough to eat.6 Ten million children die every year from easily preventable diseases.7 AIDS is killing three million people a year and is still spreading.8 One billion people in the world lack access to clean water; two billion lack access to sanitation.9 One billion adults are illiterate.10 About a quarter of the children in the poor countries do not finish primary school.11”
― William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

“Just as with the Maghribis, the clan’s ability to enforce contracts is a success on one level in making trade possible when no formal institutions are available. But on another level, the reliance on enforcement inside the clan retarded the development of formal laws and institutions that would have made available a much greater scope of trade—such as between clans.”
― William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

“There is an old Latin saying that goes, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”—which translates freely as “Why would you trust a government official any more than you would a shoplifting serial killer?”
― William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

“A woman in Bower Bank, Jamaica, had eight children. The father was in jail in the United States, no longer sending remittances.

Her fourteen-year-old daughter "get burn up from her face, breast, chest, down to her legs with boiling water February 2 1999. That night just because I never have any money earlier to cook, me go town and get a money, buy something to cook cause them never eat from morning. Me daughter bend down, to pick up something near the stove and bounce off the pot of boiling water pan herself. Me tek her to hospital and me never have the money fe register her. Me beg somebody the money and register her. Me owe the hospital $10,500 for the bill, a caan [can't] pay it. She's to go back for treatment because her hand caan stretch out or go up, but the hospital will not see her if I don't pay the bill.”
― William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

“East Asia’s share of global exports went from 12 percent in 1960 to 31 percent by 2011. The same number in Latin America over the same period declined from 7 percent to 6 percent,”
― William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

“stars, the Gang of Four and China (and Japan in earlier decades) are all in East Asia. The idea of a regional growth effect has been especially unwelcome to development experts and aid officials who want to give advice on growth. They can advise the national policy makers, but they cannot give advice to the nonexistent regional policy makers. Another sign that regional growth is an important part of the action is that regions move together from one decade to the next. For example, Latin American nations in the 1980s collectively had a famous “lost decade.” A regional credit bubble had burst: global banks had given the region a supply of easy credit at low interest rates in the 1970s, then interest rates went up and credit was cut off in the 1980s. A sensible principle for attribution for national growth performance is that a nation does not get special recognition if its performance is just at the average. It would be foolish for a nation to claim credit for growth that is the same as the average for its region. If a nation is above (or below) these averages, then we can talk about special recognition for the nation’s growth performance. This principle further reduces the share of growth variation explained by permanent national differences. Some of the variation in decade growth rates explained by national differences was really explained by regional differences. Recalculating, we now get only a little more than a tenth of the variation in decade growth rates explained by national differences. Regional growth”
― William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

“In an economy with many government interventions, skilled people opt for activities that redistribute income rather than activities that create growth.”
― William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

“los organismos de ayuda no pueden acabar con la pobreza en el mundo, pero sí pueden hacer muchas cosas útiles para satisfacer las desesperadas necesidades de los pobres y darles nuevas oportunidades.”
― William Easterly, La carga del hombre blanco: El fracaso de la ayuda al desarrollo

“La intervención militar y la ocupación revelan la clásica mentalidad del planificador: aplicar una respuesta externa y simplista desde Occidente a un problema interno y complejo del resto del mundo.”
― William Easterly, La carga del hombre blanco: El fracaso de la ayuda al desarrollo

“Some people believe labor-saving technological change is bad for the workers because it throws them out of work. This is the Luddite fallacy, one of the silliest ideas to ever come along in the long tradition of silly ideas in economics. Seeing why it's silly is a good way to illustrate further Solow's logic.

The original Luddites were hosiery and lace workers in Nottingham, England, in 1811. They smashed knitting machines that embodied new labor-saving technology as a protest against unemployment (theirs), publicizing their actions in circulars mysteriously signed "King Ludd." Smashing machines was understandable protection of self-interest for the hosiery workers. They had skills specific to the old technology and knew their skills would not be worth much with the new technology. English government officials, after careful study, addressed the Luddites' concern by hanging fourteen of them in January 1813.

The intellectual silliness came later, when some thinkers generalized the Luddites' plight into the Luddite fallacy: that an economy-wide technical breakthrough enabling production of the same amount of goods with fewer workers will result in an economy with - fewer workers. Somehow it never occurs to believers in Luddism that there's another alternative: produce more goods with the same number of workers. Labor-saving technology is another term for output-per-worker-increasing technology. All of the incentives of a market economy point toward increasing investment and output rather than decreasing employment; otherwise some extremely dumb factory owners are foregoing profit opportunities. With more output for the same number of workers, there is more income for each worker.

Of course, there could very well be some unemployment of workers who know only the old technology - like the original Luddites - and this unemployment will be excruciating to its victims. But workers as a whole are better off with more powerful output-producing technology available to them. Luddites confuse the shift of employment from old to new technologies with an overall decline in employment. The former happens; the latter doesn't. Economies experiencing technical progress, like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, do not show any long-run trend toward increasing unemployment; they do show a long-run trend toward increasing income per worker.

Solow's logic had made clear that labor-saving technical advance was the only way that output per worker could keep increasing in the long run. The neo-Luddites, with unintentional irony, denigrate the only way that workers' incomes can keep increasing in the long-run: labor-saving technological progress.

The Luddite fallacy is very much alive today. Just check out such a respectable document as the annual Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program. The 1996 Human Development Report frets about "jobless growth" in many countries. The authors say "jobless growth" happens whenever the rate of employment growth is not as high as the rate of output growth, which leads to "very low incomes" for millions of workers. The 1993 Human Development Report expressed the same concern about this "problem" of jobless growth, which was especially severe in developing countries between 1960 and 1973: "GDP growth rates were fairly high, but employment growth rates were less than half this." Similarly, a study of Vietnam in 2000 lamented the slow growth of manufacturing employment relative to manufacturing output. The authors of all these reports forget that having GDP rise faster than employment is called growth of income per worker, which happens to be the only way that workers "very low incomes" can increase.”
― William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

“The wonder of markets is that they reconcile the choices of myriad individuals.”
― William Easterly

“Just as with the Maghribis, the clan’s ability to enforce contracts is a success on one level in making trade possible when no formal institutions are available.”
― William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

“Hoy en día, la falta de retroalimentación es uno de los defectos más críticos de la ayuda.”
― William Easterly, La carga del hombre blanco: El fracaso de la ayuda al desarrollo

“Ello no supone negar que muchos agravios nacionalistas sean genuinos; se trata simplemente de que los líderes nacionalistas parecen provocar tales agravios a expensas del futuro desarrollo económico.”
― William Easterly, La carga del hombre blanco: El fracaso de la ayuda al desarrollo

“«Dado que no puedes hacer lo que quieres, pregúntate qué puedes hacer».”
― William Easterly, La carga del hombre blanco: El fracaso de la ayuda al desarrollo