Ideology of Development
William Easterley has a provocative article in Foreign Policy (via). As usual, Sachs is the embodiment of developmentalism, which is dreadful because it imposes uniform solutions from the top down rather than allowing countries to discover their own route to development.
The ideology of Development should be packed up in crates and sent off to the Museum of Dead Ideologies, just down the hall from Communism, Socialism, and Fascism. It’s time to recognize that the attempt to impose a rigid development ideology on the world’s poor has failed miserably. Fortunately, many poor societies are forging their own path toward greater freedom and prosperity anyway. That is how true revolutions happen.
I agree that the top-down imposition of policies is not such a good thing, but Easterley does not address the interest of the developed nations in using their economic power to exploit developing countries by ‘harmonizing’ their systems with that of the West. And those systems depend upon precisely the solution he calls for:
The opposite of ideology is freedom, the ability of societies to be unchained from foreign control. The only “answer” to poverty reduction is freedom from being told the answer….The opposite of Development ideology is not anything goes, but the pragmatic use of time-tested economic ideas—the benefits of specialization, comparative advantage, gains from trade, market-clearing prices, trade-offs, budget constraints—by individuals, firms, governments, and societies as they find their own success.
This list of “time-tested economic ideas” should also include colonialism and unequal exchange. But more fundamentally, the assumption that free markets will provide the solution is ideology itself, not its opposite. All efforts to provide a totalizing explanation of social organization are ideological. His concept of ‘freedom’ obscures the necessity of adopting a particular social organization without granting the possibility that they may choose to band together to produce a collective good. His own arguments seem to indicate that collective action at the national level is acceptable but collective action at the international level is not. If one were to follow his logic, we’d have to abandon all forms of government (not necessarily such a bad thing) since they impose upon the freedoms of individuals.
In short, Easterley problematizes the wrong aspect of Developmentalism and his own solution is self-contradictory.
I’ve taken a class with Easterley. If you want to learn the philosophical roots of his position, look to Popper. Easterley is a huge fan.
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