Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)

Dec 8 2025

Can the promise of economic progress ever justify conquest, coercion, and control over other people’s lives? Economist William Easterly joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to argue no--and to rethink what "development" really means in theory, in history, and in our politics today. Drawing on his new book, Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest, Easterly explores how colonial powers and later regimes like the Soviet Union claimed to increase people's material well-being while stripping them of freedom, dignity, and any say in their own fate. Russ and Easterly dig into the idea of agency--the ability of people to choose for themselves--through the lens of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Frederick Douglass, and modern debates over foreign aid, autocrats, and technocratic "solutions" imposed from afar.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: November 11, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is November 11th, 2025, and my guest is economist and author, William Easterly. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University. His latest book is Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest, which is the subject of today's conversation. This is Bill's fourth appearance on the program. He was last here in June of 2014--very long time ago--talking about the tyranny of experts. Bill, welcome back to EconTalk. William Easterly: Thank you, Russ. Pleasure to be here.
1:11	Russ Roberts: The central idea of this book is captured in its title. It's a fantastic title. A title that seems like an oxymoron: Violent Saviors. Usually, you think of saviors as being sort of peaceful and helpful, and violent people are people you want to stay away from. Why did you call your book that, and how does that capture what's going on in the book? William Easterly: Yeah. Well, one of the big ideas of the book is how much Western conquest of the rest--colonialism in general--was justified by the Western mission to bring development to the rest of the world. So, the conquest of the Americas, of Africa, of Asia, was justified saying, 'We're bringing development to these guys, so they're going to be better off. So, we're going to be their saviors.' But, of course, conquest involves violence. You conquer because you defeat the military resistance of the locals, and you maintain your role through violence. So, that's the oxymoron that the colonizers, the conquistadors, the conquerors were violent saviors, who claimed to be saving, but had to impose violence for the supposed beneficiaries of their saviorhood to accept it. Russ Roberts: And, what about modern paternalistic attempts to make people better off, which you've written about, of course, for a very, very long time? You're one of the most, I think, influential and articulate voices about the aid industry, and the attempt to improve the lot of the so called "rest"--the so-called Third World. It's not as violent, but it is a form of saviorhood, or at least purports to be. Do you remain skeptical about that effort? William Easterly: Yeah. Well, let me say a couple of things about that. First, I am not going to be equating modern development with violent colonialism. That's not where I'm going. If anything, it's the opposite. The emergence of liberalism during the colonial era has made possible the somewhat more benevolent world of development we see today. So, certainly, there is some violence in development today, but it's obviously much less than it was during the colonial era. And, I'm not going to be equating some violence with extreme violence. I'm not doing that. What I am saying is the emergence of liberalism--the emergence of liberal thinkers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, much later on, Amartya Sen--was partly in response to this history of colonial violent saviors. And so, I think understanding the way that Adam Smith and his successors reacted to violent saviors is still helpful for us today, even though we're not dealing with the same extremes that Adam Smith was dealing with in conquest and slavery. Russ Roberts: And of course, you're using the word 'liberalism' and 'liberals' in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning pro liberty. And, we'll talk more about why that is a useful way to summarize their position.
4:32	Russ Roberts: I want to read a quote from the book, which I really liked, and it will get us into a conversation about some of the concepts in this excerpt. Quote: Agency is often seen as a rather arcane concern for people experiencing extreme deprivation. Aid agencies make some effort to recognize agency by deploying even more ponderous jargon like empowerment, community-driven development, participatory development, partnerships for development, country-led development, and consultations with stakeholders and civil society. It is hard to see how the intended beneficiaries of aid really get a voice from all this. Most development debaters turn with relief away from such buzzwords to seek lower poverty rates or a higher number of Christmas turkeys. But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off, if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress? [Italics original] Close quote. Well, first, let's talk about agency. What does that word mean to you, and why do you talk about it there? William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, one little problem with agency is it is itself a jargon word that doesn't carry a lot of emotional pizzazz. We don't see marches of political dissidents holding up words saying, 'We want agency.' We recognize more words like freedom, consent, choice, self-determination. Those words carry a lot more weight. But 'agency' is a more precise word, I think, and that's why I use it. Because I think what happened with the colonial experiment, it's like the colonizers were offering, say, 'Here's our colonial rule that's going to offer you guys a lot of development, and all you have to do is give up your right to run your own lives, your own right to self-determination.' Which we can call agency. And, liberal thinkers reacted, and thinkers in the rest of the world reacted to this deal saying, 'No, thank you. You've misunderstood us. We don't just want relief from material poverty. We do want agency. We do want our right to choose our own destinies. We do want the right to consent to our own progress.' And that's, I think, what kind of emerged from this colonial history that I delved into. So, in the end, it wasn't true that development gave the conquerors the right to conquer.
7:09	Russ Roberts: And, you could also apply that analysis. Most of the book is about various types of colonialism and literal conquests, but, of course, the Communist Revolution, which purported to redeem the economic future of the citizens of, say, the Soviet Union, took away a lot of agency. It took away a lot of freedom. And, even though the early, at various times the material wellbeing of people living under the communist regime was exaggerated, overestimated enormously. So, I think they got poverty without agency. It's like the worst of both worlds. But there were many, many people who viewed this, the revolution--the Communist Revolution, the Russian Revolution--as a wonderful necessity because 'if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs,' as the saying goes. And of course, some freedom was lost, but it was in the name of something greater. You're saying that that something greater, we should always be questioned if it is not what people want. William Easterly: Yeah. I did want to talk about Lenin quite a bit in the book, and then later I talk about the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And I think you're exactly right. I think the Soviet Union is itself a great kind of case study of how you can have GDP [Gross Domestic Product] rise maybe quite rapidly, and yet really be worse off. The citizens are worse off. Because you take away their freedom in such a extreme--I mean, here, we do have extreme violence, huge violence during the Russian Civil War that the Bolsheviks won. Huge violence during Stalin's five-year plans in the 1930s;, the famine in Ukraine. And so, the fact that a lot of Western observers just looked at Soviet GDP and said, 'Oh, yeah, Soviets are catching up with us. The GDP is rising. They're closing the gap without GDP. They must be better off.' That's the kind of point of view that this book really wants to attack. That, we need kind of a broader framework in which we can look at Soviet GDP and not just obsess about the GDP. We need something else. And, that something else is what the liberal thinkers, and the liberal resistors, and the rest of the world identified during this long history: that people, in order to be better off, do need to have the right to consent to the supposed plans that are making them better off by violent actors like Lenin and Stalin, just like they did during the colonial era with Western colonial powers. Russ Roberts: And of course, the police state, the Gulag--incredible cruelty and violence to maintain the authority of the Soviet regime. And at the same time, you're very critical--obviously correctly in my view--of those who would apologize for, say, slavery in the United States, arguing that, well, yeah, sure, it's repressive, but look how well off many of the slaves are, forgetting the fact that many of them, of course, were not treated well; but some were treated well. And, the argument that that somehow might justify slavery is appalling and just vile. William Easterly: Yeah. I think the case of supposedly benevolent slavery is like a really important one for liberal thinkers, and also for liberal resistors like Frederick Douglass. Because, here's a clear case where it is quite possible material income of slaves increased. I'm not making that judgment, but thinkers from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen to the modern economic historian, Robert Fogel, have argued that yes, there's some evidence that the material consumption was higher relative to, say, those still in Africa, or relative to the white working class. And so, the liberals did not refute the benevolent slavery argument by saying, 'Oh, you're wrong. Material income is really worse.' That's not how they refuted it. That's not the effective argument that ended slavery. The effective argument was saying, 'Well, if you slave owners are so good for the slaves, why did you have to use so much force to make them slaves? Why did they not just gratefully accept your benevolence?' And, for that matter, as Abraham Lincoln said, 'Supposedly benevolent slavery is the only good that people want for other people, but not for themselves.' You know: If you slave owners think slavery is so benevolent, why don't you want it for yourself?' So, again and again, we see sort of the criteria of choice and consent as being the key benchmark of wellbeing, and not some supposedly objective indicator like GDP or material consumption.
12:11	Russ Roberts: There was a long essay series here on the Library of Economics and Liberty [Econlib], the host of EconTalk, on the role economists played in fighting against slavery. It was written by David Levy and Sandra Peart, which, you reference their book, which came out-- William Easterly: [inaudible 00:12:33] their work-- Russ Roberts: It came out of that essay series. It's fantastic work. Many people we have nice associations with-- I won't name them, but they're in the work of Levy and Peart--supported slavery, and the economists were often the ones who fought against it. In particular, economics was called the 'dismal science' by Thomas Carlyle--not because it has too many equations and leads to unpleasant exams, but because it failed to recognize that some people deserve to be subjugated. Economists said, 'No. The so-called savages and uncivilized people that you justify incarcerating and coercively enslaving are no different than the rest of us.' And, that was a case championed by many great economists. So, talk a little bit about that, and how important the economists' role was in respecting the dignity of every human being. William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, Carlyle was a big proponent of benevolent slavery, that this was supposedly a paternalistic thing by slave owners that raised the wellbeing of the slaves. But Carlyle's big opponent was John Stuart Mill, the great liberal economist. And, Mill said explicitly, 'I'm not going to dispute with Carlyle the scientific facts about whether material income went up or not. I could dispute that, but I'm not going to address that. I'm going to address the morality of the argument--that's like the ethical normative content of the argument--and not the supposedly scientific debate about whether income went up or not.' And so, again, he referred explicitly simply to the liberal principle of consent and choice. Once again, if you and other liberal economists like Harriet Martineau also climbed on board with this, again: If you slave owners are so great for the slaves, why do they run away? And, Amartya Sen said the same thing two centuries later: Why did the slaves run away if the slavery was so good for them? So, again, it's the decision to not use some supposedly objective indicator that outside experts judge as to whether people are better off, like material GDP or consumption, but use the choices of people themselves about measuring what is better off. If they resist some solutions because they think that solution makes them more soft. If they voluntarily accept some solution, then they judge that it makes them better off. And that choice criteria is how we judge progress, not supposedly objective indicators.
15:16	Russ Roberts: I want to come back to the quote I read a minute ago and read the last little part of it, because I think it's--I want to talk about it a little more broadly. And then we'll come back to the book directly. You say, quote: But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress? Close quote. So, that quote from you is making the point that you just reiterated: That agency matters, consent matters, people who run away from a situation obviously don't think it's a good one. But, I want to think about it more generally for a minute, and think about a wide variety of factors that many people have put forward to improve on the concept of, say, material wellbeing as a measure of progress. I often don't agree with all of those. I have a different list that I would pick. But I'm curious what you feel--not just in this application to people who are enslaved or colonized, but rather: Just the idea is surely the best we can do is to measure material progress. That's the economists' job. And, I think about issues like Universal Basic Income, where people argue that poverty today is something we should just accept, and we alleviate it with money. We don't have to find opportunities for these poor people. We don't have to educate them. In fact, we've often failed to find opportunities. We've done a lot of effort on that. So, the best we can do is just relieve their material suffering, and then they'll be better off. What's your thought about this generally, when we're outside the area of slavery and colonization? William Easterly: Well, of course, the modern equivalent of what you're saying might be the benevolent autocrats' argument, which I've talked with you about before. The idea that if you have a dictator using a lot of force, but if they raise GDP or reduce poverty rates, then they are a good thing. And then, the big question is: Who gets to decide that? And I think one of the points here is that it's really impossible to do this kind of value-free development idea. This idea that development analysis can be sort of value-free, and we're just concentrating on poverty. I mean, implicitly, when you do that, you're saying, 'I judge for these people that only poverty matters to them, and things like dignity and self-respect and agency, I implicitly judge that those don't matter.' That's what you're implicitly doing when you're saying, 'Well, I can't do anything about measuring those things, so I'm just going to concentrate on the measurable thing.' That's fine, but who are you to decide that? Who are you to decide for other people that you only want to concentrate on the aspect of their needs that you think you want to deal with? And you're not going to recognize the needs that you don't want to deal with? Implicitly, you are making a value judgment. And, at least maybe it's a valid value judgment, but at least you should admit that you're making a value judgment. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Another thing I'd add to that list that people might care about beyond material wellbeing is family. We've talked a lot on the program about people who stay in economically depressed areas either because they're comfortable there, they know and understand the norms and mores of that society, or they want to be near their family--their parents, their siblings--and the idea that somehow they're making a mistake because they won't move. And, well, comment on that, first; then[?] I have a follow-up question. William Easterly: Yeah. A more kind of low-key example of that is poor people are often criticized for spending so much on weddings and funerals, which obviously are very family-oriented. And, the comment is, 'Oh, if only they had spent that money on their own education, or investing in cows, or whatever, they'd be better off.' So, they're being irrational, spending so much on weddings and funerals. But then, when we come back to the issue: Who are we, as outside Western experts parachuting in, to decide for them that funerals and weddings are a low priority, and something else like education should be a high priority for them? Who are we to decide that for them? The sort of 'deciding things for them' is the thing that's bothering me the most about this area, and that's why I'm resorting so much to more extreme examples to at least get us to acknowledge that, at least in some cases, that mindset really leads us badly astray. So, let's think about whether it's leading us astray in these more mild cases that we have today.
20:33	Russ Roberts: I was once called by a reporter who wants to know my opinion of sending money from the United States to, let's say, Africa--I can't remember the exact situation, but some country in Africa--to improve their school system. And I said I was against it--to the horror of this reporter who judged me for not caring. And I said, 'We can't even spend money effectively in our own country, where we presumably know something about the people in the school system and the actors and players. The idea that we could spend money abroad in an alien culture, in a foreign country, is hubris.' And I still believe that. But I also worry--and I'm curious what your take on this is--I also worry that dismissing opportunities like that is sometimes convenient because it takes me out of being responsible for helping people. And I think, of course, there's a different argument that: Yeah, you can't be responsible. They have to be responsible for themselves. But again, I'm always worrying that that gives me an excuse for not being involved--which, I don't like that. So, help me out, or disagree. William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, I also, for myself, don't want to go to the other extreme, and me decide for poor people that they should care about agency and not about material income. Obviously, all of us, I can just imagine some debate opponent characterizing my opinion is sort of like 'Let them eat agency.' Russ Roberts: Exactly, yeah. There you go. William Easterly: And so, it's important that: yes, we all recognize--'we' meaning whoever is in this debate--that yes, material income is extremely important. Disease and famine are extremely important. Alleviating those things is extremely important. And, some people are in such extreme circumstances that probably it is the case that the most urgent necessity is just material immediate relief. It's quite possible that is. And, it's not for me to, again, impose on someone else saying, 'I want you to care about dignity and agency and not about your material income.' That's not for me to decide. The principle is always the same: Who are we--by the way, who is included in this 'we'? Let's talk about that, some--but: Who are we to decide for others what their goal should be?
23:17	Russ Roberts: I want to digress for a minute because there was a conversation--it's not a literal digression--but there's a conversation in the book about Adam Smith and mercantilism. And, I just want to read this because I thought it was such a beautiful, simple set of observations. Now, mercantilism, I'm pretty sure it starts--as far as I remember, when I used to look in, care about this more--I think it starts around the 13th century. And, I always like to mention that when people make fun of me for appealing, say, to Adam Smith or David Ricardo about trade policy, criticizing my view by saying, 'Well, that is hundreds of years old. Come on, haven't we learned more since then? Shouldn't we care about, say, the trade balance?' And, I say, 'Well, that concern is actually even older.' It's about 800 years old, and I think it was wrong. But, mercantilism never dies. It has an appeal; and I just want to read this quote here. And you say, Mercantilist views are still around today, as if the object of policy should be to make everything at home. Smith's original insight is as compelling as ever. If achieving trade surpluses is the goal, there is an unresolvable conflict between nations. If one nation is running a surplus, one or more other nations must be running a trade deficit. Mercantilism sees trade as a zero-sum game. Policymakers compete with each other to make their nation the one with the trade surplus by restricting imports. The competition will kill off international trade and both sides will be worse off. Smith defined progress by what people wanted rather than by what the mercantilist experts said they should want. Trade "carries out" [Russ Roberts: And now, you're quoting Smith, I think--] Trade "carries out that surplus part of the produce of their land and labour for which there is no demand among them, and brings back in return for it something else for which there is a demand." [Russ Roberts: Close quote from Adam Smith. You add--] The crucial word here is "demand." Which, meaning something they want. And then you point out, which I've never seen before: Variations on the noun "choice" or verb "choose" occur forty-eight times in The Wealth of Nations, usually referring to individual choice. Smith mentions "consent" twenty-four times. So, I love that. If you want to add anything about mercantilism, you may. William Easterly: Yeah. Well, I think two points. One is that mercantilism is another example of some objective indicator of progress that has nothing to do with what people want, but just what some experts think is a good measure of progress. In this case, a really stupid one, as you explain. Second, I think it's really important--this is really a big crucial point--that when Smith was emphasizing consent and choice so much, he saw a clear way to achieve that kind of mutual consent that is a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum game. And that way is trade. Commerce. Commerce and trade, we--either in domestic markets or with foreign countries and foreign agents. Like your quote that you just gave, we take something we want in exchange for something we give to them that they want. In fact, in this case, there is no paternalism. There is no coercion. We just both freely engage in a trade that we both think makes us better off. So, that is the big engine that Smith saw as available to the world to make possible this principle of consent. One big way to make possible the principle of consent. And, that in turn informed his critique of colonialism. He said about the Western conquest of the Americas, of the New World, he said: 'Oh, this is so tragic because we could have just engaged in trade with these peoples. We could have taken from that. There are big opportunities for trade.' We now know about goods like chocolate that were invented in the New World that people in Europe turned out to want quite a lot. And, there were these big opportunities for trade, but instead of concentrating on trade, the West concentrated on violent conquest, dispossession, coercion. And so, the Native peoples in the Americas were made much worse off when they could have been made better off. I can give you the exact quotes from Smith, but that's his argument, very clearly made in one part of the Wealth of Nations. Russ Roberts: Well, he has some very powerful statements in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about the dignity of so-called--he sometimes calls them savages, I think you point out in your book, but he respected them deeply. He simply meant by that, that they did not have the accoutrements of civilization. He honored them in very eloquent ways. Russ Roberts: Before going to a different topic, I just want to read a brief quote here about Kant--the philosopher, Immanuel Kant--because it's just a special joke here that I really enjoyed. You write, Kant in his writings counterbalanced what it means to be human against violations of dignity: [Russ Roberts: Here's the Kant quote:] As a person (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in itself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world. [--Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals. Parentheses original to Easterly] End of the Kant quote. And you add: Kant's usually tortured syntax was not going to give him much of a future in the refrigerator magnet industry. Close quote. I just love that. Thank you for writing that. You can add, if you--say anything you want, or we can just move on. William Easterly: No, I'm just laughing at my own joke. Russ Roberts: It's lovely.
29:42	Russ Roberts: I want to ask you about an important part of the Liberal Movement from both economists, philosophers, and others--and you talk about it many times in the book--which is freedom as an end in and of itself. And, you mentioned earlier that--I think it was Mill or others used the moral argument against slavery, the moral argument against coercion. He didn't debate whether slavery made people materially better off. He simply saw their slavery or their coercion in the case of, say, communism--later--as a bad. And, I have noted in my lifetime that that argument is rarely, if ever, made. If you go back and you watch interviews, say, with Margaret Thatcher, she will often invoke freedom as an end in and of itself. And it seems so archaic, because no modern politician in the United States--and I doubt in Britain, either--will make that argument. It's considered--I don't know what the word is--it's just not persuasive to most people. They no longer value freedom in and of itself. They care about outcomes. We've become much more utilitarian, I would argue, over the last 50 years. Do you agree with me? And, what are your thoughts on that? William Easterly: Yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure if it's exactly over the last 50 years-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, I made that up-- William Easterly: It was already shifting in the late 19th century with Alfred Marshall and the founders of the American Economic Association in the United States. They were already saying: 'We don't want moral debates. We just want scientific analysis of what raises GDP.' I think all of us modern economists, are in some degree, heirs to that emphasis. So, obviously, we can't just dispute that. That is an important debate. But, what they lost and the penalties for losing this in the late 19th century were big because they were going to implicitly justify a lot of bad things like eugenics with the original founders of the American Economic Association, as Thomas Leonard has so eloquently shown. So, really, I think it goes back to that. And, I think what's maybe notable and a little discouraging for me is, you know, one generation after another of liberal economists have tried to make this point--that freedom should be an end in itself. Going all the way back to Adam Smith, but in more modern times, it was P.T. Bauer, the great development economist, saying, 'Freedom should be an end in itself.' Milton Friedman saying, 'Freedom should be an end in itself.' Amartya Sen coming along writing a book, Development as Freedom. And all of these efforts, at least in the intellectual marketplace, unfortunately failed. They failed to get people to take freedom as a goal in itself, or even to recognize what they were saying. Even to acknowledge what they were saying. When you read reviews of Bauer and Friedman's books, the reviewers never say, 'Well, congrats to these guys for at least recognizing freedom should be an end in itself.' They never say that. They always are just disputing whether freedom raises GDP or not. That's always a debate. And I think even kind of modern classical liberals themselves realizing maybe that this intellectual debate is really hard to win, the liberals, modern classical liberals themselves often emphasize also the fact of liberty on material GDP, and primarily that. And, it's like liberals are sort of giving away one of their big arguments for liberal policies--like, letting markets and free trade work--is that that is a way to satisfy another big human need, another big human need for agency and freedom, and the dignity that that confers. I think we liberals sort of throw away that argument that should be working for us. But apparently, it's not working well enough that we bother investing our time in that.
34:10	Russ Roberts: Yeah. I've been on the other side of this debate--not quite the other side: depends on how you define the side. But, when you argue about, say, about the minimum wage, one argument would be is it violates the freedom of employer and employee to contract freely. And, that argument gets zero traction. I have usually used the argument that it actually makes poor people worse off, which is a variant of what you're criticizing. But, the freedom argument in the modern world gets no traction. You want to speculate about why that is? Why is it so hard to talk about the importance of consent, dignity, and agency, which is a word--you called it a piece of jargon, but I think it's an incredibly important piece of jargon. Why do we get no traction with that argument? William Easterly: Well, I think maybe we recognize that moral debates are maybe in some way harder to win than scientific debates, because who is going to decide what are the right morals? If somebody else has different morals about what economics should do, or what development policy should do, how are we going to counteract that except maybe using the strategies of the Western liberals--that maybe we can appeal to reciprocity. You know: If you want freedom for yourself, then shouldn't you not be hypocritical? Shouldn't you also want freedom for others? And, I think this low profile of freedom is mainly about wanting freedom for others. We're reluctant to admit that others might want freedom. Usually, we do have a lot more clarity about wanting freedom for ourselves. And I think that's the failure, is that we fail to kind of do the Adam Smith move of kind of the sympathy--invoking sympathy with others. This is also a John Stuart Mill move, to sort of recognize the rights of others as being the same as ourselves. That's maybe our only hope for kind of trying to appeal to people to kind of think differently about morality. But apparently that argument has not worked that well either, because the intellectual debate, as you noted continues to pay almost no attention to freedom as a goal in itself. The only hopeful thing I would say about that, Russ--and this is another theme I think from intellectual history--even when the classical liberals are losing the argument over and over again, what actually happened is actually closer to what they want than what their opponents want. So, slavery did end, but supposedly benevolent slavery did end. Colonialism did end. New conquest mainly ended. Replacement of indigenous people with European people, that did mostly end. And so, over time, we see, despite the somewhat inept attempts of us classical liberals, classical liberal ideas have been advancing a lot in the world. There has been a massive move in the long run over the past two centuries from mainly coercive relationships between the West and the rest--the West imposing violence on the rest--to, today, most of the relationship is dominated by trade. Trade between the West and the rest exploded in the 20th century. And, that's not been reversed despite the current difficulties with free trade. So, that's the only hopeful thing I can say at the end. It's, like, we lose all the intellectual arguments as close to liberals as advocates of liberty and freedom, but in the end, freedom is advancing. Russ Roberts: At least for now. I'm a little bit worried about it. William Easterly: At least for now. Yeah. I'm not going to say that's some inextricable, irreversible thing either. Russ Roberts: I just want to mention--what? William Easterly: So far, over the last two centuries, it advanced a lot. Russ Roberts: I just want to mention three episodes that come to mind on these topics that we have, and we'll put links up to them. We have an interview with Thomas Leonard who you just mentioned. We have the interview with Mike Munger, which--a fantastic interview on the attempts of slave owners to reassure themselves they were actually helping their slaves. It's a powerful conversation we had. And, I want to go also add a shoutout to a very old episode we did with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Congo, where he talks about King Leopold as a tyrant. And that raises the question, who was the real King Leopold, the one in the Congo or the one who was revered in Belgium as a moderate and a reformer? And, Bruce's answer at the time, which I loved and still love, is that: 'Well, in Belgium, he was constrained by his political opponents. In the Congo, he had a free hand to be himself. And, what he revealed there is incredibly ugly. So, that's the real Leopold.'
39:37	Russ Roberts: I want to talk a little bit about Frederick Douglass. You invoke Adam Smith's 'man of system'--the passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments which we've talked about a number of times on the program: the idea that there are people who have a idealized view of the world, a system, and who want to move people around in life as if they were chess pieces. But, Smith points out that they have a movement of their own in real life. They are not pawns or even bishops. And, of course, I've always loved that passage. But you really paint Frederick Douglass as something of a laissez faire liberal--an opponent, an eloquent opponent of the man of system viewpoint from a much more laissez faire perspective than I would have expected ex ante. So, talk about that. William Easterly: Yeah. I think he does not get enough recognition as a major liberal thinker with a tremendous perspective of himself being a former slave and very much in tune with slaves and ex-slaves. Because, during the Civil War, when he was advocating so forcefully that Lincoln and the Union adopt emancipation as an objective and not just restoring the Union, he gave these very emphatic speeches in which he said to his White audiences, 'Yes, you ridicule me. I don't have a specific anti-poverty plan for how to help slaves or maybe what to do with them after they're liberated. And, I don't apologize for that. Yes, I don't have a plan. In fact, I could even say we Black people in the United States would be a lot better off if you just left us alone and did nothing for us. Because so far, your doing something has amounted to supposedly benevolent slavery.' And another huge movement in the United States during the pre-Civil War era was the idea of colonizing Blacks back to Africa after they were emancipated from slavery. Another thing that Black leaders like Frederick Douglass showed zero interest in--going to Liberia after being emancipated from slavery. And, as Douglass is saying: 'So, far, you've offered benevolent slavery and forced expulsion from the United States to Liberia. No, thank you. We don't need any more crazy plans for what you Whites want to do with us Black people.' And, that continued even after the Civil War, when White attempts to help the freed men were very well-intentioned and good: but Douglass said, 'Can't you put us in charge of those efforts, and can't you recognize that in life after freedom, us operating in free labor markets and free goods markets? We're already taking more charge of our own destiny, and we're succeeding somewhat on our own. Thank you very much. Can't you recognize our own efforts and not just treat us as paternalistic wards of White philanthropy?' So, he stated those views very forcefully in the decades after the Civil War, and he's not really been recognized enough for that. I think the modern reaction to that is, 'Oh, was he talking about self-reliance as a way to increase material income?' And so, the debate defaults again to the effect on material income of that argument, failing to recognize that Douglass had another goal in mind besides material poverty for ex-slaves. Of course, he cared about the material poverty, but he had something else--was this quest for agency, dignity, respect, self-determination that he thought was really being neglected even after emancipation.
43:37	Russ Roberts: You talk about the fact that--I think it's an incredibly profound insight; it's incredibly simple but it's remarkably hard to remember--which is: Sometimes doing something is worse than doing nothing. Doing nothing is--it has a bad name because it's misunderstood. Doing nothing often means letting other things happen that you didn't initiate, that are outside your own agency as a policymaker, say. But before you do something, you'd want to know that it was better than doing nothing. And yet that standard is rarely invoked. It's usually, just, 'Well, something is always better than nothing. You can't just let something persist. That's bad. You have to fix it.' And, our human--for a variety of reasons, I think both as individuals, I think that's good advice for an individual trying to take charge of their own life. I don't think it's very good advice for a national policy experiment. But, comment about that. William Easterly: Yeah. Well, I think you and I are on a quest for the least popular arguments in the modern policy debate. And I agree with you. I think doing nothing can often be superior to doing something. There's an old joke, which I'm not sure where it came from--something like: If a modern politician has two choices, A, to do nothing, and B, to do something that makes it worse, he will always choose B.' Doing something to make it worse is still better than doing nothing. If you think of any debate that modern policy is having, I think that's not too much of a caricature.
45:24	Russ Roberts: So, in our lifetime--and you've been involved in this directly in many ways; I've been much more obviously an observer--but in our lifetime, we've seen extraordinary material transformation of billions of people in China and India. You can debate how that came about, and how much of it was freedom versus top-down intervention. But, we've had extraordinary changes. We still have large--millions, probably a billion or so--people who live in very dire straits materially. And, how should we think about that? How should we think about, quote, "the rest"? The people who haven't joined the modern economy? What should our attitude be toward them, both as voters in the United States who might have a say in various programs, but also as philanthropists? You know, when we think about the efforts to improve philanthropy, the Effective Altruism movement--as an individual or as a voter, how should I feel about the people who are materially worse off than I am? Some of them, of course, have non-material things I don't have that are wonderful and positive. We've already referred to many of those already. But, do you have a thought on how to guide people who might be thinking about their inherent desire to, quote, "fix this problem"? Or do something positive? William Easterly: Yeah. I'm glad you asked that question because I do want to make very clear that material poverty is a huge thing. It is a huge thing. And, all of us who work in economic development, definitely including myself, have worked most of our careers on that objective of reducing material poverty, looking for things that do effectively reduce material poverty, recognizing that as a huge objective. And of course, that is an objective that often is consistent with the consent principle. I mean, most of us do consent to have a higher income instead of a lower income. Or, people are likely to consent to having less hunger, less disease, less poverty. And so, there are many times where material--I want to make clear that material income can be reliable in a lot of cases. And so, you could somewhat justify this emphasis on material poverty with that argument. But the argument, I think, is more that: Why should that be the only thing? Can you at least create a little bit of space for something else, that there's a lot of--historically been a huge discussion about by both Western economists and by thinkers and leaders in the rest of the world? That they do want self-determination. They do want agency, both individual and collective. And, it's not for us to take that away by saying, 'Oh, we want to concentrate on material poverty. We, as development experts, that's all that we know how to do. It would be a lot more convenient for us if you just didn't raise this whole, all this stuff about dignity and agency and self-determination and consent because we don't know how to do anything about that. And, we're mainly looking for views of the world that make our kind of approach to economic development kind of feasible and comfortable.' And so, that's where we as development experts tend to wind it up. Including those who do have a lot of sympathy with freedom. So, it's not an easy question. I don't want to just say it's easy, just say consent, consent, consent, and everything's easy and everything goes away. There are trade-offs, as always in economics. How much could more emphasis be put on dignity and agency? How much could that really have the promise of making poor people off also, in addition to, and in a few cases, instead of approaches that only emphasize material poverty, no matter how much violence is imposed on those to achieve material poverty reduction? You mentioned China as an example. Of course, China has the greatest reduction in poverty in world economic history over the past 50 years. Incredible, remarkable. Deserves tremendous credit. But don't forget that this happened at the same time as atrocities like the Great Famine, the one-child policy, that certainly--we cannot minimize the effect on a family, on a couple, on a mother of having enforcers of the one-child policy come in and say, 'You have to have an abortion because we don't allow you to have one more child.' That also matters. And, I think we're embarrassed to admit that also matters because it doesn't fit neatly into the frameworks that we want to use about reducing material poverty. And so, this admission that something else does matter, I think, is what is needed here. It's not saying agency and dignity and consent are the only things that matter. It's saying: Can you make a little bit of room for them to also matter? Because it certainly seems that it does matter to those who are in the receiving end of agency and freedom and coercion. Russ Roberts: Very well said.
51:19	Russ Roberts: I want to say something about paternalism in the only place that I would say it's healthy, which is in the family--paternalism and maternalism. And when our children are young, of course, we are paternalistic toward them. We keep them out of harm's way. We keep them away from traffic and touching the stove when it's on, and so on. And, children don't like that, by the way. I always say that the desire to do what you want starts young; and it starts really at birth. And here we are in this weird position as parents of manipulating our children, trying to teach them what's dangerous, what's healthy. And, I think one of the challenges of parenting--and I don't know whether I've done a good job or not, but I think about it more and more as I get older, and as, of course, my children get older--which is: In the West, I think there's an earlier and earlier age where children really resent the attempts of their parents to control them. In ancient times, allegedly--I don't know if it was true; it could be a myth--but, say, Victorian times, children, quote, "knew their place." And they were submissive. They were slaves of a certain kind--not with the horrors of chattel slavery, but they were certainly controlled by their parents. And, of course, as our children leave our homes, like we did as children, we all were--they want freedom. They want agency, they want dignity, they might occasionally want help being under our wing, but they also want to be on the wing and on their own. And, I think it's very hard for most parents. So, there's this weird paradox in human life, which is that we all start life off as children. We resent, often, being told what to do by our parents. Then we become parents, and we convince ourselves that our children need us to tell them what's best for them. Until eventually, we ideally realize that there is an age--it comes earlier or later depending on your parenting style--where you have to let your children find their own way and make their own mistakes, and make choices different than the ones you'd make for them, and so on. But I think the challenge--if you're a parent, you realize how hard it is to give up control and to allow your children agency. And it might help us understand better the impulse we have when we have power over other nations and to help them and hurt them unwittingly, even if we're good and well-intentioned. Something about that human urge. William Easterly: I'm glad you raised the childhood example. Because, first of all, this was a favorite metaphor of those who advocated Western conquest as a good thing for the rest. It's, like, very much the metaphor that--there was this awful phrase used, the 'child races.' The supposed adults among the Europeans would paternalistically benefit the child races by bringing in colonial rulers who had raised material GDP in places like Africa, claiming to lift up Native American tribes in the United States. There were conscious development efforts that, again, were treating them like children, and the white Americans were the adults that were deciding what the Creeks and the Cherokees needed to achieve adulthood in economic terms. And sometimes these material efforts--not that they always failed; sometimes they succeeded--but it violated a very central human demand, I think, which all of us can relate to, that we ourselves don't like to be treated as children. No adult likes to be treated as a child. In fact, I think you and I, Russ, probably recognized with our children--as you were hinting at--not even children like to be treated as children. Nobody likes to be treated as a child. Russ Roberts: Correct. William Easterly: And, that certainly resonates with my experience as a father and grandfather. So, I think there's another way to kind of more viscerally appreciate why paternalism is such an insult: because, paternalism is saying, 'I'm an adult; you're a child.' And, maybe your whole ethnic group is a child or children, which is even worse because it's denying you any hope of being an adult because your ethnic group--which you can't change--irrevocably makes you a child. And so, that is another reason why this, during colonial times, this demand for respect and agency was so powerful, so visceral at that level.
56:43	Russ Roberts: I think I probably told this story before, but I once was debating, I think it was Social Security, with a friend of mine. And I was suggesting that it would be better for people to take responsibility for their own retirement, invest their own money, and so on. And, this friend of mine said that: Well, that might be true for some people, but not for, say, his assistant at work, who obviously didn't have the education and sophistication to make investment decisions. After all, she maybe had never been to college, or if she had, she certainly didn't have a sophisticated understanding of the world. And, you know, my response to that--I had two responses, one of which I said and one of which I didn't say. The one I said was, 'Well, the way markets work--and this is one of the most beautiful things about markets--is that if you give your assistant the freedom to choose for herself what to invest in, she will not be left in the lurch. There will be organizations and agencies, and all kinds of things will emerge to help her invest wisely.' Of course, I also admit there would be scam artists and con artists trying to fleece her and make a quick buck that wouldn't work out well for her. But that would be her responsibility. And that would be a good thing because then you'd be treating her like an adult instead of like your eight-year-old child. And, that was what I said. I thought it was a good argument. I liked it. But the second argument--which I didn't say--is that: He was not a particularly good investor. He was investing in individual stocks. He'd never heard of index funds. I don't know what his portfolio looked like in any detail. But, just the presumption that he was wise and she was ignorant, when in fact it may have been the other way around, is--it's deeply depressing, and I think a common challenge and problem we face when trying to give people freedom and agency. William Easterly: Yeah, this is a great point. I mean, I think we could sort of try to distinguish two things. Sort of the empirical argument: Do more educated and affluent people demand more agency? Do they care more about agency and dignity? And, that could be true. It could be true. It's correlated with education and income. There should be, I think, more empirical tests of that rather than less. But even if that was true, it still doesn't give the educated people or higher income people the right to decide that for somebody else at a lower income, lower education. It still should be up to each individual how much they want to care about their own dignity and agency. And, I think this is a kind of deeper level of, like, meta-consent in some way. You should have the right to consent to how much you want to emphasize the right to consent. Right? You should have the ability to choose among these goals and how much weight to put on each one of consent, agency, and material relief from poverty and security in the old age and retirement and all that. And that choice should not be made for you by some outside person who might be more educated or high income. They should not presume because they're at a higher level of education that they can make that judgment for you better than you can make it yourself. That's yet again another example of extreme paternalism and treating them like a child. Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's remarkable how hard that is. It's a form of hubris, self-righteousness, ego. And, I think your point that when people apply that argument to me, I'm deeply offended. But, somehow it's okay to do it to other people. It is a remarkable asymmetry in logic. It's not a good thing. William Easterly: I think of an example that I talk about in the book where there's this big campaign in Uganda to send in Western forces to capture Joseph Kony, a very evil warlord. But that campaign perpetrated what some Ugandans and other Africans felt with a lot of stereotypes about violent Africans and child soldiers and universal war in Africa. Which, I think of one Ugandan blogger named TMS Ruge, R-U-G-E, who said, 'Don't these efforts recognize the agency of Ugandans to make their own choices, the efforts of Ugandans on their own to fight Joseph Kony, which they had been doing for two decades already, and kind of denying agency and respect to Ugandans under the pretext of intervening to fight war?' And, Nicholas Kristof said about this--he said, 'Well, I think these African intellectuals are conveying the views of educated people: that they want respect. And, I think the victims of the war just want to rescue it from Joseph Kony. And there's nothing wrong with these NGO [non-governmental organizations] efforts to rescue them from Joseph Kony.' And, both sides have valid points to make. But I think Kristof was sort of deciding on behalf of Africans that he didn't think that most Africans cared about agency, and he was kind of dismissive of those who did as just these unrepresentative, educated individuals. We could talk more about other examples of that, like Dambisa Moyo and Magatte Wade, who also emphasize dignity and respect and fighting stereotypes in Africa a lot. And so, I think this debate between Kristof and those thinkers--also Teju Cole who wrote this argument at the time about the white savior industrial complex in Africa. Which Kristof also violently rejected, again saying, 'This is just the viewpoint of some educated African that has this kind of unnatural attachment to their own dignity.' I think when we put things in that context, we can see these are super relevant debates for fighting war and violence and poverty in Africa today. And, they don't have simple answers, but it's very healthy that this debate take place. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been William Easterly. His book is Violent Saviors. Bill, thanks for being part of EconTalk. William Easterly: Thanks, Russ.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: November 11, 2025.]

Russ Roberts: Today is November 11th, 2025, and my guest is economist and author, William Easterly. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University. His latest book is Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest, which is the subject of today's conversation.

This is Bill's fourth appearance on the program. He was last here in June of 2014--very long time ago--talking about the tyranny of experts. Bill, welcome back to EconTalk.

William Easterly: Thank you, Russ. Pleasure to be here.

1:11

Russ Roberts: The central idea of this book is captured in its title. It's a fantastic title. A title that seems like an oxymoron: Violent Saviors. Usually, you think of saviors as being sort of peaceful and helpful, and violent people are people you want to stay away from. Why did you call your book that, and how does that capture what's going on in the book?

William Easterly: Yeah. Well, one of the big ideas of the book is how much Western conquest of the rest--colonialism in general--was justified by the Western mission to bring development to the rest of the world. So, the conquest of the Americas, of Africa, of Asia, was justified saying, 'We're bringing development to these guys, so they're going to be better off. So, we're going to be their saviors.' But, of course, conquest involves violence. You conquer because you defeat the military resistance of the locals, and you maintain your role through violence. So, that's the oxymoron that the colonizers, the conquistadors, the conquerors were violent saviors, who claimed to be saving, but had to impose violence for the supposed beneficiaries of their saviorhood to accept it.

Russ Roberts: And, what about modern paternalistic attempts to make people better off, which you've written about, of course, for a very, very long time? You're one of the most, I think, influential and articulate voices about the aid industry, and the attempt to improve the lot of the so called "rest"--the so-called Third World. It's not as violent, but it is a form of saviorhood, or at least purports to be. Do you remain skeptical about that effort?

William Easterly: Yeah. Well, let me say a couple of things about that.

First, I am not going to be equating modern development with violent colonialism. That's not where I'm going. If anything, it's the opposite. The emergence of liberalism during the colonial era has made possible the somewhat more benevolent world of development we see today. So, certainly, there is some violence in development today, but it's obviously much less than it was during the colonial era.

And, I'm not going to be equating some violence with extreme violence. I'm not doing that.

What I am saying is the emergence of liberalism--the emergence of liberal thinkers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, much later on, Amartya Sen--was partly in response to this history of colonial violent saviors. And so, I think understanding the way that Adam Smith and his successors reacted to violent saviors is still helpful for us today, even though we're not dealing with the same extremes that Adam Smith was dealing with in conquest and slavery.

Russ Roberts: And of course, you're using the word 'liberalism' and 'liberals' in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning pro liberty. And, we'll talk more about why that is a useful way to summarize their position.

4:32

Russ Roberts: I want to read a quote from the book, which I really liked, and it will get us into a conversation about some of the concepts in this excerpt. Quote:

Agency is often seen as a rather arcane concern for people experiencing extreme deprivation. Aid agencies make some effort to recognize agency by deploying even more ponderous jargon like empowerment, community-driven development, participatory development, partnerships for development, country-led development, and consultations with stakeholders and civil society. It is hard to see how the intended beneficiaries of aid really get a voice from all this. Most development debaters turn with relief away from such buzzwords to seek lower poverty rates or a higher number of Christmas turkeys.

But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off, if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress? [Italics original]

Close quote.

Well, first, let's talk about agency. What does that word mean to you, and why do you talk about it there?

William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, one little problem with agency is it is itself a jargon word that doesn't carry a lot of emotional pizzazz. We don't see marches of political dissidents holding up words saying, 'We want agency.' We recognize more words like freedom, consent, choice, self-determination. Those words carry a lot more weight.

But 'agency' is a more precise word, I think, and that's why I use it. Because I think what happened with the colonial experiment, it's like the colonizers were offering, say, 'Here's our colonial rule that's going to offer you guys a lot of development, and all you have to do is give up your right to run your own lives, your own right to self-determination.' Which we can call agency.

And, liberal thinkers reacted, and thinkers in the rest of the world reacted to this deal saying, 'No, thank you. You've misunderstood us. We don't just want relief from material poverty. We do want agency. We do want our right to choose our own destinies. We do want the right to consent to our own progress.' And that's, I think, what kind of emerged from this colonial history that I delved into.

So, in the end, it wasn't true that development gave the conquerors the right to conquer.

7:09

Russ Roberts: And, you could also apply that analysis. Most of the book is about various types of colonialism and literal conquests, but, of course, the Communist Revolution, which purported to redeem the economic future of the citizens of, say, the Soviet Union, took away a lot of agency. It took away a lot of freedom. And, even though the early, at various times the material wellbeing of people living under the communist regime was exaggerated, overestimated enormously. So, I think they got poverty without agency. It's like the worst of both worlds. But there were many, many people who viewed this, the revolution--the Communist Revolution, the Russian Revolution--as a wonderful necessity because 'if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs,' as the saying goes. And of course, some freedom was lost, but it was in the name of something greater. You're saying that that something greater, we should always be questioned if it is not what people want.

William Easterly: Yeah. I did want to talk about Lenin quite a bit in the book, and then later I talk about the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And I think you're exactly right. I think the Soviet Union is itself a great kind of case study of how you can have GDP [Gross Domestic Product] rise maybe quite rapidly, and yet really be worse off. The citizens are worse off. Because you take away their freedom in such a extreme--I mean, here, we do have extreme violence, huge violence during the Russian Civil War that the Bolsheviks won. Huge violence during Stalin's five-year plans in the 1930s;, the famine in Ukraine.

And so, the fact that a lot of Western observers just looked at Soviet GDP and said, 'Oh, yeah, Soviets are catching up with us. The GDP is rising. They're closing the gap without GDP. They must be better off.' That's the kind of point of view that this book really wants to attack. That, we need kind of a broader framework in which we can look at Soviet GDP and not just obsess about the GDP. We need something else. And, that something else is what the liberal thinkers, and the liberal resistors, and the rest of the world identified during this long history: that people, in order to be better off, do need to have the right to consent to the supposed plans that are making them better off by violent actors like Lenin and Stalin, just like they did during the colonial era with Western colonial powers.

Russ Roberts: And of course, the police state, the Gulag--incredible cruelty and violence to maintain the authority of the Soviet regime.

And at the same time, you're very critical--obviously correctly in my view--of those who would apologize for, say, slavery in the United States, arguing that, well, yeah, sure, it's repressive, but look how well off many of the slaves are, forgetting the fact that many of them, of course, were not treated well; but some were treated well. And, the argument that that somehow might justify slavery is appalling and just vile.

William Easterly: Yeah. I think the case of supposedly benevolent slavery is like a really important one for liberal thinkers, and also for liberal resistors like Frederick Douglass. Because, here's a clear case where it is quite possible material income of slaves increased. I'm not making that judgment, but thinkers from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen to the modern economic historian, Robert Fogel, have argued that yes, there's some evidence that the material consumption was higher relative to, say, those still in Africa, or relative to the white working class.

And so, the liberals did not refute the benevolent slavery argument by saying, 'Oh, you're wrong. Material income is really worse.' That's not how they refuted it. That's not the effective argument that ended slavery. The effective argument was saying, 'Well, if you slave owners are so good for the slaves, why did you have to use so much force to make them slaves? Why did they not just gratefully accept your benevolence?'

And, for that matter, as Abraham Lincoln said, 'Supposedly benevolent slavery is the only good that people want for other people, but not for themselves.' You know: If you slave owners think slavery is so benevolent, why don't you want it for yourself?'

So, again and again, we see sort of the criteria of choice and consent as being the key benchmark of wellbeing, and not some supposedly objective indicator like GDP or material consumption.

12:11

Russ Roberts: There was a long essay series here on the Library of Economics and Liberty [Econlib], the host of EconTalk, on the role economists played in fighting against slavery. It was written by David Levy and Sandra Peart, which, you reference their book, which came out--

William Easterly: [inaudible 00:12:33] their work--

Russ Roberts: It came out of that essay series. It's fantastic work. Many people we have nice associations with-- I won't name them, but they're in the work of Levy and Peart--supported slavery, and the economists were often the ones who fought against it.

In particular, economics was called the 'dismal science' by Thomas Carlyle--not because it has too many equations and leads to unpleasant exams, but because it failed to recognize that some people deserve to be subjugated. Economists said, 'No. The so-called savages and uncivilized people that you justify incarcerating and coercively enslaving are no different than the rest of us.' And, that was a case championed by many great economists. So, talk a little bit about that, and how important the economists' role was in respecting the dignity of every human being.

William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, Carlyle was a big proponent of benevolent slavery, that this was supposedly a paternalistic thing by slave owners that raised the wellbeing of the slaves. But Carlyle's big opponent was John Stuart Mill, the great liberal economist. And, Mill said explicitly, 'I'm not going to dispute with Carlyle the scientific facts about whether material income went up or not. I could dispute that, but I'm not going to address that. I'm going to address the morality of the argument--that's like the ethical normative content of the argument--and not the supposedly scientific debate about whether income went up or not.' And so, again, he referred explicitly simply to the liberal principle of consent and choice. Once again, if you and other liberal economists like Harriet Martineau also climbed on board with this, again: If you slave owners are so great for the slaves, why do they run away?

And, Amartya Sen said the same thing two centuries later: Why did the slaves run away if the slavery was so good for them?

So, again, it's the decision to not use some supposedly objective indicator that outside experts judge as to whether people are better off, like material GDP or consumption, but use the choices of people themselves about measuring what is better off. If they resist some solutions because they think that solution makes them more soft. If they voluntarily accept some solution, then they judge that it makes them better off. And that choice criteria is how we judge progress, not supposedly objective indicators.

15:16

Russ Roberts: I want to come back to the quote I read a minute ago and read the last little part of it, because I think it's--I want to talk about it a little more broadly. And then we'll come back to the book directly. You say, quote:

But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress?

Close quote.

So, that quote from you is making the point that you just reiterated: That agency matters, consent matters, people who run away from a situation obviously don't think it's a good one.

But, I want to think about it more generally for a minute, and think about a wide variety of factors that many people have put forward to improve on the concept of, say, material wellbeing as a measure of progress.

I often don't agree with all of those. I have a different list that I would pick. But I'm curious what you feel--not just in this application to people who are enslaved or colonized, but rather: Just the idea is surely the best we can do is to measure material progress. That's the economists' job. And, I think about issues like Universal Basic Income, where people argue that poverty today is something we should just accept, and we alleviate it with money. We don't have to find opportunities for these poor people. We don't have to educate them. In fact, we've often failed to find opportunities. We've done a lot of effort on that. So, the best we can do is just relieve their material suffering, and then they'll be better off. What's your thought about this generally, when we're outside the area of slavery and colonization?

William Easterly: Well, of course, the modern equivalent of what you're saying might be the benevolent autocrats' argument, which I've talked with you about before. The idea that if you have a dictator using a lot of force, but if they raise GDP or reduce poverty rates, then they are a good thing.

And then, the big question is: Who gets to decide that?

And I think one of the points here is that it's really impossible to do this kind of value-free development idea. This idea that development analysis can be sort of value-free, and we're just concentrating on poverty. I mean, implicitly, when you do that, you're saying, 'I judge for these people that only poverty matters to them, and things like dignity and self-respect and agency, I implicitly judge that those don't matter.'

That's what you're implicitly doing when you're saying, 'Well, I can't do anything about measuring those things, so I'm just going to concentrate on the measurable thing.'

That's fine, but who are you to decide that? Who are you to decide for other people that you only want to concentrate on the aspect of their needs that you think you want to deal with? And you're not going to recognize the needs that you don't want to deal with?

Implicitly, you are making a value judgment. And, at least maybe it's a valid value judgment, but at least you should admit that you're making a value judgment.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Another thing I'd add to that list that people might care about beyond material wellbeing is family. We've talked a lot on the program about people who stay in economically depressed areas either because they're comfortable there, they know and understand the norms and mores of that society, or they want to be near their family--their parents, their siblings--and the idea that somehow they're making a mistake because they won't move. And, well, comment on that, first; then[?] I have a follow-up question.

William Easterly: Yeah. A more kind of low-key example of that is poor people are often criticized for spending so much on weddings and funerals, which obviously are very family-oriented. And, the comment is, 'Oh, if only they had spent that money on their own education, or investing in cows, or whatever, they'd be better off.' So, they're being irrational, spending so much on weddings and funerals.

But then, when we come back to the issue: Who are we, as outside Western experts parachuting in, to decide for them that funerals and weddings are a low priority, and something else like education should be a high priority for them? Who are we to decide that for them? The sort of 'deciding things for them' is the thing that's bothering me the most about this area, and that's why I'm resorting so much to more extreme examples to at least get us to acknowledge that, at least in some cases, that mindset really leads us badly astray.

So, let's think about whether it's leading us astray in these more mild cases that we have today.

20:33

Russ Roberts: I was once called by a reporter who wants to know my opinion of sending money from the United States to, let's say, Africa--I can't remember the exact situation, but some country in Africa--to improve their school system. And I said I was against it--to the horror of this reporter who judged me for not caring. And I said, 'We can't even spend money effectively in our own country, where we presumably know something about the people in the school system and the actors and players. The idea that we could spend money abroad in an alien culture, in a foreign country, is hubris.'

And I still believe that.

But I also worry--and I'm curious what your take on this is--I also worry that dismissing opportunities like that is sometimes convenient because it takes me out of being responsible for helping people. And I think, of course, there's a different argument that: Yeah, you can't be responsible. They have to be responsible for themselves.

But again, I'm always worrying that that gives me an excuse for not being involved--which, I don't like that. So, help me out, or disagree.

William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, I also, for myself, don't want to go to the other extreme, and me decide for poor people that they should care about agency and not about material income. Obviously, all of us, I can just imagine some debate opponent characterizing my opinion is sort of like 'Let them eat agency.'

Russ Roberts: Exactly, yeah. There you go.

William Easterly: And so, it's important that: yes, we all recognize--'we' meaning whoever is in this debate--that yes, material income is extremely important. Disease and famine are extremely important. Alleviating those things is extremely important. And, some people are in such extreme circumstances that probably it is the case that the most urgent necessity is just material immediate relief. It's quite possible that is. And, it's not for me to, again, impose on someone else saying, 'I want you to care about dignity and agency and not about your material income.' That's not for me to decide. The principle is always the same: Who are we--by the way, who is included in this 'we'? Let's talk about that, some--but: Who are we to decide for others what their goal should be?

23:17

Russ Roberts: I want to digress for a minute because there was a conversation--it's not a literal digression--but there's a conversation in the book about Adam Smith and mercantilism. And, I just want to read this because I thought it was such a beautiful, simple set of observations. Now, mercantilism, I'm pretty sure it starts--as far as I remember, when I used to look in, care about this more--I think it starts around the 13th century. And, I always like to mention that when people make fun of me for appealing, say, to Adam Smith or David Ricardo about trade policy, criticizing my view by saying, 'Well, that is hundreds of years old. Come on, haven't we learned more since then? Shouldn't we care about, say, the trade balance?' And, I say, 'Well, that concern is actually even older.' It's about 800 years old, and I think it was wrong. But, mercantilism never dies. It has an appeal; and I just want to read this quote here.

And you say,

Mercantilist views are still around today, as if the object of policy should be to make everything at home. Smith's original insight is as compelling as ever. If achieving trade surpluses is the goal, there is an unresolvable conflict between nations. If one nation is running a surplus, one or more other nations must be running a trade deficit. Mercantilism sees trade as a zero-sum game. Policymakers compete with each other to make their nation the one with the trade surplus by restricting imports. The competition will kill off international trade and both sides will be worse off.

Smith defined progress by what people wanted rather than by what the mercantilist experts said they should want. Trade "carries out" [Russ Roberts: And now, you're quoting Smith, I think--] Trade "carries out that surplus part of the produce of their land and labour for which there is no demand among them, and brings back in return for it something else for which there is a demand." [Russ Roberts: Close quote from Adam Smith. You add--] The crucial word here is "demand."

Which, meaning something they want.

And then you point out, which I've never seen before:

Variations on the noun "choice" or verb "choose" occur forty-eight times in The Wealth of Nations, usually referring to individual choice. Smith mentions "consent" twenty-four times.

So, I love that. If you want to add anything about mercantilism, you may.

William Easterly: Yeah. Well, I think two points. One is that mercantilism is another example of some objective indicator of progress that has nothing to do with what people want, but just what some experts think is a good measure of progress. In this case, a really stupid one, as you explain.

Second, I think it's really important--this is really a big crucial point--that when Smith was emphasizing consent and choice so much, he saw a clear way to achieve that kind of mutual consent that is a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum game. And that way is trade. Commerce. Commerce and trade, we--either in domestic markets or with foreign countries and foreign agents.

Like your quote that you just gave, we take something we want in exchange for something we give to them that they want. In fact, in this case, there is no paternalism. There is no coercion. We just both freely engage in a trade that we both think makes us better off.

So, that is the big engine that Smith saw as available to the world to make possible this principle of consent. One big way to make possible the principle of consent. And, that in turn informed his critique of colonialism. He said about the Western conquest of the Americas, of the New World, he said: 'Oh, this is so tragic because we could have just engaged in trade with these peoples. We could have taken from that. There are big opportunities for trade.' We now know about goods like chocolate that were invented in the New World that people in Europe turned out to want quite a lot.

And, there were these big opportunities for trade, but instead of concentrating on trade, the West concentrated on violent conquest, dispossession, coercion. And so, the Native peoples in the Americas were made much worse off when they could have been made better off. I can give you the exact quotes from Smith, but that's his argument, very clearly made in one part of the Wealth of Nations.

Russ Roberts: Well, he has some very powerful statements in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about the dignity of so-called--he sometimes calls them savages, I think you point out in your book, but he respected them deeply. He simply meant by that, that they did not have the accoutrements of civilization. He honored them in very eloquent ways.

Russ Roberts: Before going to a different topic, I just want to read a brief quote here about Kant--the philosopher, Immanuel Kant--because it's just a special joke here that I really enjoyed. You write,

Kant in his writings counterbalanced what it means to be human against violations of dignity: [Russ Roberts: Here's the Kant quote:]
As a person (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in itself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world. [--Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals. Parentheses original to Easterly]

End of the Kant quote.

And you add:

Kant's usually tortured syntax was not going to give him much of a future in the refrigerator magnet industry.

Close quote. I just love that. Thank you for writing that.

You can add, if you--say anything you want, or we can just move on.

William Easterly: No, I'm just laughing at my own joke.

Russ Roberts: It's lovely.

29:42

Russ Roberts: I want to ask you about an important part of the Liberal Movement from both economists, philosophers, and others--and you talk about it many times in the book--which is freedom as an end in and of itself. And, you mentioned earlier that--I think it was Mill or others used the moral argument against slavery, the moral argument against coercion. He didn't debate whether slavery made people materially better off. He simply saw their slavery or their coercion in the case of, say, communism--later--as a bad.

And, I have noted in my lifetime that that argument is rarely, if ever, made.

If you go back and you watch interviews, say, with Margaret Thatcher, she will often invoke freedom as an end in and of itself. And it seems so archaic, because no modern politician in the United States--and I doubt in Britain, either--will make that argument. It's considered--I don't know what the word is--it's just not persuasive to most people. They no longer value freedom in and of itself. They care about outcomes. We've become much more utilitarian, I would argue, over the last 50 years. Do you agree with me? And, what are your thoughts on that?

William Easterly: Yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure if it's exactly over the last 50 years--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I made that up--

William Easterly: It was already shifting in the late 19th century with Alfred Marshall and the founders of the American Economic Association in the United States. They were already saying: 'We don't want moral debates. We just want scientific analysis of what raises GDP.'

I think all of us modern economists, are in some degree, heirs to that emphasis. So, obviously, we can't just dispute that. That is an important debate.

But, what they lost and the penalties for losing this in the late 19th century were big because they were going to implicitly justify a lot of bad things like eugenics with the original founders of the American Economic Association, as Thomas Leonard has so eloquently shown. So, really, I think it goes back to that.

And, I think what's maybe notable and a little discouraging for me is, you know, one generation after another of liberal economists have tried to make this point--that freedom should be an end in itself. Going all the way back to Adam Smith, but in more modern times, it was P.T. Bauer, the great development economist, saying, 'Freedom should be an end in itself.' Milton Friedman saying, 'Freedom should be an end in itself.' Amartya Sen coming along writing a book, Development as Freedom.

And all of these efforts, at least in the intellectual marketplace, unfortunately failed. They failed to get people to take freedom as a goal in itself, or even to recognize what they were saying. Even to acknowledge what they were saying. When you read reviews of Bauer and Friedman's books, the reviewers never say, 'Well, congrats to these guys for at least recognizing freedom should be an end in itself.' They never say that. They always are just disputing whether freedom raises GDP or not. That's always a debate.

And I think even kind of modern classical liberals themselves realizing maybe that this intellectual debate is really hard to win, the liberals, modern classical liberals themselves often emphasize also the fact of liberty on material GDP, and primarily that.

And, it's like liberals are sort of giving away one of their big arguments for liberal policies--like, letting markets and free trade work--is that that is a way to satisfy another big human need, another big human need for agency and freedom, and the dignity that that confers. I think we liberals sort of throw away that argument that should be working for us. But apparently, it's not working well enough that we bother investing our time in that.

34:10

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I've been on the other side of this debate--not quite the other side: depends on how you define the side. But, when you argue about, say, about the minimum wage, one argument would be is it violates the freedom of employer and employee to contract freely. And, that argument gets zero traction. I have usually used the argument that it actually makes poor people worse off, which is a variant of what you're criticizing. But, the freedom argument in the modern world gets no traction. You want to speculate about why that is? Why is it so hard to talk about the importance of consent, dignity, and agency, which is a word--you called it a piece of jargon, but I think it's an incredibly important piece of jargon. Why do we get no traction with that argument?

William Easterly: Well, I think maybe we recognize that moral debates are maybe in some way harder to win than scientific debates, because who is going to decide what are the right morals? If somebody else has different morals about what economics should do, or what development policy should do, how are we going to counteract that except maybe using the strategies of the Western liberals--that maybe we can appeal to reciprocity. You know: If you want freedom for yourself, then shouldn't you not be hypocritical? Shouldn't you also want freedom for others?

And, I think this low profile of freedom is mainly about wanting freedom for others. We're reluctant to admit that others might want freedom. Usually, we do have a lot more clarity about wanting freedom for ourselves. And I think that's the failure, is that we fail to kind of do the Adam Smith move of kind of the sympathy--invoking sympathy with others.

This is also a John Stuart Mill move, to sort of recognize the rights of others as being the same as ourselves. That's maybe our only hope for kind of trying to appeal to people to kind of think differently about morality. But apparently that argument has not worked that well either, because the intellectual debate, as you noted continues to pay almost no attention to freedom as a goal in itself.

The only hopeful thing I would say about that, Russ--and this is another theme I think from intellectual history--even when the classical liberals are losing the argument over and over again, what actually happened is actually closer to what they want than what their opponents want. So, slavery did end, but supposedly benevolent slavery did end. Colonialism did end. New conquest mainly ended. Replacement of indigenous people with European people, that did mostly end.

And so, over time, we see, despite the somewhat inept attempts of us classical liberals, classical liberal ideas have been advancing a lot in the world. There has been a massive move in the long run over the past two centuries from mainly coercive relationships between the West and the rest--the West imposing violence on the rest--to, today, most of the relationship is dominated by trade. Trade between the West and the rest exploded in the 20th century. And, that's not been reversed despite the current difficulties with free trade.

So, that's the only hopeful thing I can say at the end. It's, like, we lose all the intellectual arguments as close to liberals as advocates of liberty and freedom, but in the end, freedom is advancing.

Russ Roberts: At least for now. I'm a little bit worried about it.

William Easterly: At least for now. Yeah. I'm not going to say that's some inextricable, irreversible thing either.

Russ Roberts: I just want to mention--what?

William Easterly: So far, over the last two centuries, it advanced a lot.

Russ Roberts: I just want to mention three episodes that come to mind on these topics that we have, and we'll put links up to them. We have an interview with Thomas Leonard who you just mentioned. We have the interview with Mike Munger, which--a fantastic interview on the attempts of slave owners to reassure themselves they were actually helping their slaves. It's a powerful conversation we had. And, I want to go also add a shoutout to a very old episode we did with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Congo, where he talks about King Leopold as a tyrant. And that raises the question, who was the real King Leopold, the one in the Congo or the one who was revered in Belgium as a moderate and a reformer? And, Bruce's answer at the time, which I loved and still love, is that: 'Well, in Belgium, he was constrained by his political opponents. In the Congo, he had a free hand to be himself. And, what he revealed there is incredibly ugly. So, that's the real Leopold.'

39:37

Russ Roberts: I want to talk a little bit about Frederick Douglass. You invoke Adam Smith's 'man of system'--the passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments which we've talked about a number of times on the program: the idea that there are people who have a idealized view of the world, a system, and who want to move people around in life as if they were chess pieces. But, Smith points out that they have a movement of their own in real life. They are not pawns or even bishops. And, of course, I've always loved that passage. But you really paint Frederick Douglass as something of a laissez faire liberal--an opponent, an eloquent opponent of the man of system viewpoint from a much more laissez faire perspective than I would have expected ex ante. So, talk about that.

William Easterly: Yeah. I think he does not get enough recognition as a major liberal thinker with a tremendous perspective of himself being a former slave and very much in tune with slaves and ex-slaves. Because, during the Civil War, when he was advocating so forcefully that Lincoln and the Union adopt emancipation as an objective and not just restoring the Union, he gave these very emphatic speeches in which he said to his White audiences, 'Yes, you ridicule me. I don't have a specific anti-poverty plan for how to help slaves or maybe what to do with them after they're liberated. And, I don't apologize for that. Yes, I don't have a plan. In fact, I could even say we Black people in the United States would be a lot better off if you just left us alone and did nothing for us. Because so far, your doing something has amounted to supposedly benevolent slavery.'

And another huge movement in the United States during the pre-Civil War era was the idea of colonizing Blacks back to Africa after they were emancipated from slavery. Another thing that Black leaders like Frederick Douglass showed zero interest in--going to Liberia after being emancipated from slavery.

And, as Douglass is saying: 'So, far, you've offered benevolent slavery and forced expulsion from the United States to Liberia. No, thank you. We don't need any more crazy plans for what you Whites want to do with us Black people.'

And, that continued even after the Civil War, when White attempts to help the freed men were very well-intentioned and good: but Douglass said, 'Can't you put us in charge of those efforts, and can't you recognize that in life after freedom, us operating in free labor markets and free goods markets? We're already taking more charge of our own destiny, and we're succeeding somewhat on our own. Thank you very much. Can't you recognize our own efforts and not just treat us as paternalistic wards of White philanthropy?'

So, he stated those views very forcefully in the decades after the Civil War, and he's not really been recognized enough for that.

I think the modern reaction to that is, 'Oh, was he talking about self-reliance as a way to increase material income?' And so, the debate defaults again to the effect on material income of that argument, failing to recognize that Douglass had another goal in mind besides material poverty for ex-slaves. Of course, he cared about the material poverty, but he had something else--was this quest for agency, dignity, respect, self-determination that he thought was really being neglected even after emancipation.

43:37

Russ Roberts: You talk about the fact that--I think it's an incredibly profound insight; it's incredibly simple but it's remarkably hard to remember--which is: Sometimes doing something is worse than doing nothing.

Doing nothing is--it has a bad name because it's misunderstood. Doing nothing often means letting other things happen that you didn't initiate, that are outside your own agency as a policymaker, say.

But before you do something, you'd want to know that it was better than doing nothing. And yet that standard is rarely invoked. It's usually, just, 'Well, something is always better than nothing. You can't just let something persist. That's bad. You have to fix it.'

And, our human--for a variety of reasons, I think both as individuals, I think that's good advice for an individual trying to take charge of their own life. I don't think it's very good advice for a national policy experiment. But, comment about that.

William Easterly: Yeah. Well, I think you and I are on a quest for the least popular arguments in the modern policy debate.

And I agree with you. I think doing nothing can often be superior to doing something.

There's an old joke, which I'm not sure where it came from--something like: If a modern politician has two choices, A, to do nothing, and B, to do something that makes it worse, he will always choose B.' Doing something to make it worse is still better than doing nothing. If you think of any debate that modern policy is having, I think that's not too much of a caricature.

45:24

Russ Roberts: So, in our lifetime--and you've been involved in this directly in many ways; I've been much more obviously an observer--but in our lifetime, we've seen extraordinary material transformation of billions of people in China and India. You can debate how that came about, and how much of it was freedom versus top-down intervention. But, we've had extraordinary changes. We still have large--millions, probably a billion or so--people who live in very dire straits materially. And, how should we think about that? How should we think about, quote, "the rest"? The people who haven't joined the modern economy? What should our attitude be toward them, both as voters in the United States who might have a say in various programs, but also as philanthropists?

You know, when we think about the efforts to improve philanthropy, the Effective Altruism movement--as an individual or as a voter, how should I feel about the people who are materially worse off than I am?

Some of them, of course, have non-material things I don't have that are wonderful and positive. We've already referred to many of those already. But, do you have a thought on how to guide people who might be thinking about their inherent desire to, quote, "fix this problem"? Or do something positive?

William Easterly: Yeah. I'm glad you asked that question because I do want to make very clear that material poverty is a huge thing. It is a huge thing. And, all of us who work in economic development, definitely including myself, have worked most of our careers on that objective of reducing material poverty, looking for things that do effectively reduce material poverty, recognizing that as a huge objective.

And of course, that is an objective that often is consistent with the consent principle. I mean, most of us do consent to have a higher income instead of a lower income. Or, people are likely to consent to having less hunger, less disease, less poverty.

And so, there are many times where material--I want to make clear that material income can be reliable in a lot of cases. And so, you could somewhat justify this emphasis on material poverty with that argument.

But the argument, I think, is more that: Why should that be the only thing? Can you at least create a little bit of space for something else, that there's a lot of--historically been a huge discussion about by both Western economists and by thinkers and leaders in the rest of the world? That they do want self-determination. They do want agency, both individual and collective. And, it's not for us to take that away by saying, 'Oh, we want to concentrate on material poverty. We, as development experts, that's all that we know how to do. It would be a lot more convenient for us if you just didn't raise this whole, all this stuff about dignity and agency and self-determination and consent because we don't know how to do anything about that. And, we're mainly looking for views of the world that make our kind of approach to economic development kind of feasible and comfortable.'

And so, that's where we as development experts tend to wind it up. Including those who do have a lot of sympathy with freedom.

So, it's not an easy question. I don't want to just say it's easy, just say consent, consent, consent, and everything's easy and everything goes away. There are trade-offs, as always in economics. How much could more emphasis be put on dignity and agency? How much could that really have the promise of making poor people off also, in addition to, and in a few cases, instead of approaches that only emphasize material poverty, no matter how much violence is imposed on those to achieve material poverty reduction?

You mentioned China as an example. Of course, China has the greatest reduction in poverty in world economic history over the past 50 years. Incredible, remarkable. Deserves tremendous credit. But don't forget that this happened at the same time as atrocities like the Great Famine, the one-child policy, that certainly--we cannot minimize the effect on a family, on a couple, on a mother of having enforcers of the one-child policy come in and say, 'You have to have an abortion because we don't allow you to have one more child.' That also matters. And, I think we're embarrassed to admit that also matters because it doesn't fit neatly into the frameworks that we want to use about reducing material poverty.

And so, this admission that something else does matter, I think, is what is needed here. It's not saying agency and dignity and consent are the only things that matter. It's saying: Can you make a little bit of room for them to also matter? Because it certainly seems that it does matter to those who are in the receiving end of agency and freedom and coercion.

Russ Roberts: Very well said.

51:19

Russ Roberts: I want to say something about paternalism in the only place that I would say it's healthy, which is in the family--paternalism and maternalism. And when our children are young, of course, we are paternalistic toward them. We keep them out of harm's way. We keep them away from traffic and touching the stove when it's on, and so on.

And, children don't like that, by the way. I always say that the desire to do what you want starts young; and it starts really at birth. And here we are in this weird position as parents of manipulating our children, trying to teach them what's dangerous, what's healthy. And, I think one of the challenges of parenting--and I don't know whether I've done a good job or not, but I think about it more and more as I get older, and as, of course, my children get older--which is: In the West, I think there's an earlier and earlier age where children really resent the attempts of their parents to control them.

In ancient times, allegedly--I don't know if it was true; it could be a myth--but, say, Victorian times, children, quote, "knew their place." And they were submissive. They were slaves of a certain kind--not with the horrors of chattel slavery, but they were certainly controlled by their parents. And, of course, as our children leave our homes, like we did as children, we all were--they want freedom. They want agency, they want dignity, they might occasionally want help being under our wing, but they also want to be on the wing and on their own. And, I think it's very hard for most parents.

So, there's this weird paradox in human life, which is that we all start life off as children. We resent, often, being told what to do by our parents. Then we become parents, and we convince ourselves that our children need us to tell them what's best for them. Until eventually, we ideally realize that there is an age--it comes earlier or later depending on your parenting style--where you have to let your children find their own way and make their own mistakes, and make choices different than the ones you'd make for them, and so on.

But I think the challenge--if you're a parent, you realize how hard it is to give up control and to allow your children agency. And it might help us understand better the impulse we have when we have power over other nations and to help them and hurt them unwittingly, even if we're good and well-intentioned. Something about that human urge.

William Easterly: I'm glad you raised the childhood example. Because, first of all, this was a favorite metaphor of those who advocated Western conquest as a good thing for the rest. It's, like, very much the metaphor that--there was this awful phrase used, the 'child races.' The supposed adults among the Europeans would paternalistically benefit the child races by bringing in colonial rulers who had raised material GDP in places like Africa, claiming to lift up Native American tribes in the United States. There were conscious development efforts that, again, were treating them like children, and the white Americans were the adults that were deciding what the Creeks and the Cherokees needed to achieve adulthood in economic terms.

And sometimes these material efforts--not that they always failed; sometimes they succeeded--but it violated a very central human demand, I think, which all of us can relate to, that we ourselves don't like to be treated as children. No adult likes to be treated as a child. In fact, I think you and I, Russ, probably recognized with our children--as you were hinting at--not even children like to be treated as children. Nobody likes to be treated as a child.

Russ Roberts: Correct.

William Easterly: And, that certainly resonates with my experience as a father and grandfather.

So, I think there's another way to kind of more viscerally appreciate why paternalism is such an insult: because, paternalism is saying, 'I'm an adult; you're a child.' And, maybe your whole ethnic group is a child or children, which is even worse because it's denying you any hope of being an adult because your ethnic group--which you can't change--irrevocably makes you a child. And so, that is another reason why this, during colonial times, this demand for respect and agency was so powerful, so visceral at that level.

56:43

Russ Roberts: I think I probably told this story before, but I once was debating, I think it was Social Security, with a friend of mine. And I was suggesting that it would be better for people to take responsibility for their own retirement, invest their own money, and so on. And, this friend of mine said that: Well, that might be true for some people, but not for, say, his assistant at work, who obviously didn't have the education and sophistication to make investment decisions. After all, she maybe had never been to college, or if she had, she certainly didn't have a sophisticated understanding of the world.

And, you know, my response to that--I had two responses, one of which I said and one of which I didn't say. The one I said was, 'Well, the way markets work--and this is one of the most beautiful things about markets--is that if you give your assistant the freedom to choose for herself what to invest in, she will not be left in the lurch. There will be organizations and agencies, and all kinds of things will emerge to help her invest wisely.'

Of course, I also admit there would be scam artists and con artists trying to fleece her and make a quick buck that wouldn't work out well for her. But that would be her responsibility. And that would be a good thing because then you'd be treating her like an adult instead of like your eight-year-old child.

And, that was what I said. I thought it was a good argument. I liked it.

But the second argument--which I didn't say--is that: He was not a particularly good investor. He was investing in individual stocks. He'd never heard of index funds. I don't know what his portfolio looked like in any detail. But, just the presumption that he was wise and she was ignorant, when in fact it may have been the other way around, is--it's deeply depressing, and I think a common challenge and problem we face when trying to give people freedom and agency.

William Easterly: Yeah, this is a great point. I mean, I think we could sort of try to distinguish two things. Sort of the empirical argument: Do more educated and affluent people demand more agency? Do they care more about agency and dignity? And, that could be true. It could be true. It's correlated with education and income. There should be, I think, more empirical tests of that rather than less.

But even if that was true, it still doesn't give the educated people or higher income people the right to decide that for somebody else at a lower income, lower education. It still should be up to each individual how much they want to care about their own dignity and agency. And, I think this is a kind of deeper level of, like, meta-consent in some way. You should have the right to consent to how much you want to emphasize the right to consent. Right? You should have the ability to choose among these goals and how much weight to put on each one of consent, agency, and material relief from poverty and security in the old age and retirement and all that.

And that choice should not be made for you by some outside person who might be more educated or high income. They should not presume because they're at a higher level of education that they can make that judgment for you better than you can make it yourself. That's yet again another example of extreme paternalism and treating them like a child.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's remarkable how hard that is. It's a form of hubris, self-righteousness, ego. And, I think your point that when people apply that argument to me, I'm deeply offended. But, somehow it's okay to do it to other people. It is a remarkable asymmetry in logic. It's not a good thing.

William Easterly: I think of an example that I talk about in the book where there's this big campaign in Uganda to send in Western forces to capture Joseph Kony, a very evil warlord. But that campaign perpetrated what some Ugandans and other Africans felt with a lot of stereotypes about violent Africans and child soldiers and universal war in Africa. Which, I think of one Ugandan blogger named TMS Ruge, R-U-G-E, who said, 'Don't these efforts recognize the agency of Ugandans to make their own choices, the efforts of Ugandans on their own to fight Joseph Kony, which they had been doing for two decades already, and kind of denying agency and respect to Ugandans under the pretext of intervening to fight war?'

And, Nicholas Kristof said about this--he said, 'Well, I think these African intellectuals are conveying the views of educated people: that they want respect. And, I think the victims of the war just want to rescue it from Joseph Kony. And there's nothing wrong with these NGO [non-governmental organizations] efforts to rescue them from Joseph Kony.'

And, both sides have valid points to make. But I think Kristof was sort of deciding on behalf of Africans that he didn't think that most Africans cared about agency, and he was kind of dismissive of those who did as just these unrepresentative, educated individuals.

We could talk more about other examples of that, like Dambisa Moyo and Magatte Wade, who also emphasize dignity and respect and fighting stereotypes in Africa a lot. And so, I think this debate between Kristof and those thinkers--also Teju Cole who wrote this argument at the time about the white savior industrial complex in Africa. Which Kristof also violently rejected, again saying, 'This is just the viewpoint of some educated African that has this kind of unnatural attachment to their own dignity.'

I think when we put things in that context, we can see these are super relevant debates for fighting war and violence and poverty in Africa today. And, they don't have simple answers, but it's very healthy that this debate take place.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been William Easterly. His book is Violent Saviors. Bill, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

William Easterly: Thanks, Russ.

Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Political Economy of Power

Sebastian Junger on Freedom

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Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Political Economy of Power

Sebastian Junger on Freedom

READER COMMENTS

Ajit Kirpekar

Dec 8 2025 at 11:57am

Dr G

Dec 11 2025 at 12:34pm

Charlie Clarke

Dec 8 2025 at 2:24pm

William Hope

Dec 9 2025 at 9:00am

Shalom Freedman

Dec 10 2025 at 3:52am

Eamon

Dec 10 2025 at 1:59pm

Dr G

Dec 11 2025 at 12:22pm

John L

Dec 24 2025 at 5:25pm

Nitin

Jan 1 2026 at 4:08am

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