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83 turns · 59 min[gentle music] When I was in my early 20s trying to figure out what to do with my life, I went and lived for a few months in the beautiful city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Officially, I was there to do volunteer work, but I learned pretty quickly that I didn't have a lot of hard skills to offer as a volunteer. I did spend a lot of time in a used bookstore with a great English language section, and it's there that I picked up a book with the provocative title, "The White Man's Burden: Why The West's Efforts To Aid The Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good" by William Easterly. This book opened my eyes to the idea of development as a highly contested space, less do-gooder career path and more contest of ideas about power and control, plans and reality, success and failure. As one who didn't actually know how to build a clean cookstove and spoke poor Spanish, I felt called out. As one fascinated by this idea of development as more of an unresolved argument than a set of straightforward answers, I felt like a door had opened. Last year, Easterly wrote a new book. It's called "Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest." It's a history, but it's also more like a reminder, maybe a warning. His thinking has evolved in the last two decades. In some ways, it's more expansive. He's thinking beyond development as material gain, about deeper layers of human experience. He's also very open about what he has learned from illness in his own life, what it's taught him about agency and having a voice in decisions that affect you. This conversation meant a lot to me, a real full circle moment. Here's Bill Easterly. Bill Easterly, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Michael. Great to be here.
So I want to start with a concept that's a through line in your book, and that is what you call the development right of conquest.
Mm-hmm.
Can you explain what that is and why you see it as a recurring tendency among groups of people who are ostensibly trying to aid in the development of other groups of people?
Yeah. So, you know, I started to read a history of, uh, kind of thinking of intellectual thought about colonialism, and I sort of stumbled ac- across this kind of recurrent theme that many of the colonizers and, and conquerors did justify what they were doing as a way to bring progress or civilization or sometimes even use the word development to the people they were conquering. And this, this started, uh, this idea started happening very early on and then was repeated really over and over again and applied even to ex- such extreme cases of slavery, uh, the conquest of Native Americans, uh, the colonization of Africa, of course, even, uh, the depredations of Leopold in the Belgian Congo. He claimed that he was bringing progress and civilization. So, um, you know, this, this fascinated me 'cause it really raised the paradox of, um, how we really think about development, success, and failure. You know, if it's literally true that development conquerors do bring, do bring a higher material level of income to the people they're conquering, does that make it okay? Or how do we think about that? Uh, and you know, our conventional way of thinking of development
Episode notes
Development economist William Easterly famously does not mince words about the disappointments of anti-poverty megaprojects and far-fetched foreign aid plans.
For much of his career, Easterly has taken aim at experts who export their visions onto other people’s countries and communities — drawing from his own experience as one of those very experts.
In his latest book, “Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest,” Easterly unearths the long history of what he calls “the development right of conquest,” a worldview that has sacrificed individual rights and agency at the altar of material gain. He traces the long-standing tension between those who pushed for development at all costs and the dissenting voices who resisted them.
In the fourth episode of Theory of Change, Easterly unpacks the implications of that history for contemporary development efforts. He reflects on what alternative approaches to improving human well-being might look like — and what role aid institutions should play in pursuing them.
“There’s this technocratic illusion that you can reduce development to just technology and effectiveness of achieving measurable gains and these technical indicators of well-being,” he tells Devex Senior Reporter Michael Igoe.
**“I think we all realize deep down the fantasy of keeping things purely technocratic is really a fantasy, that there