United Nations: “A Very Ineffective Club of Dictators”
Or, is it “An Ineffective Club of Bureaucrats”
United Nations: “A Very Ineffective Club of Dictators”
Or, is it “An Ineffective Club of Bureaucrats”
By Stephen Heins, January 2019
In December 2018, the Wall Street Journal did an interview with William Easterly, who is development economist at NYU. When Mr. Easterly started work for the World Bank, the “dominant view favored heavy-handed, top-down planning,” as many experts saw poor countries as blank slates ready for a technocratic plan.
Unsurprisingly, the development leaders were enamored with central planning, that doled out their technocratic genius like a “benevolent dictators.” Within time, Easterly realized that stated-driven approaches were inferior to those market-driven. In Ghana, their leaders supported economic freedom allowing the market work. In fact, he calls the United Nation as “a very ineffective club of dictators.
In most cases, the World Bank ended up just giving loans to really bad governments. Essentially, the World and International Monetary Fund never design aid programs incentives to grow. Like most examples of Western arrogance, these aid programs were simply expected to provide a silver bullet to issues such as population control that didn’t resolve any of the underlying problems. As a writer, Mr. Easterly wrote a book, entitled where he discusses the failures of the development community.
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Wikipedia
William Easterly, an economist , specializing in economic development . He is a professor of economics at New York University , along with Africa House, and co-director of NYU's Development Research Institute. [2] He is an NBER Research Fellow , senior fellow in Duke University's Bureau of Development Economics Research and Analysis (ROTI) , and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC . Easterly is an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth .
Easterly is the author of three books: The Elusive Quest for Growth : The Economist's Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001); The White Man's Burden: Why Western Efforts to Help the Rest Have Done So Much Bad and So Little Good (2006), which won the 2008 Hayek Award; and The Tyranny of Experts : Economist, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014), [3] which was a finalist for the 2015 Hayek Prize. [4]
Born in West Virginia [5] and raised in Bowling Green , Ohio , Easterly received a BA from Bowling Green State University in 1979 and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1985. From 1985 to 2001 he worked at the World Bank as an economist and senior adviser in the Macroeconomics and Growth Division; he is also an adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies .
Easterly then worked at the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development until 2003, when he began teaching at NYU. [6]
Easterly has worked in many areas of developing countries and some transition economies , most notably in Africa, Latin America and Russia.
Easterly is skeptical of many of the prevailing trends in foreign aid. In The Elusive Quest for Growth , he analyzes the reasons why foreign aid to many third world countries has failed to produce sustainable growth . He reviewed the many " elixir " that had been tried since World War II but few demonstrated their efforts. Among them is one that has recently come back into vogue: debt relief . The drug had been tried many times before, he said, with negative results more often than positive, and required a more rigorous process. [7
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