The field of development economics ignores all the factors that make free-market countries successful — while lining the personal pockets of its advocates.
In 2007 New York City-based professor and economist William Easterly published his intentionally provocative book, White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. In it, he argued that after more than half a century of Western aid to the “third world,” there was no positive correlation between the amount of money given and a rise in a recipient nation’s GDP.
This was followed by another book in 2014 by the same author called The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. In this book, he carried his argument even further by pointing out that one of the main reasons that so many third-world countries were still “developing” is that Western experts have invented a field called “development economics.”
