William Easterly

William Easterly
Born	c. 1957 (age 66–67) Morgantown, West Virginia
Nationality	United States
Academic career
Field	Political economy, International development
School or tradition	Chicago School
Influences	Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman

William Russell Easterly is an American economist, specializing in economic growth and foreign aid. He is a Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Easterly is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics.

Easterly maintained a blog called "Aid Watch" where he posted regularly about aid related issues.

He has also spoken at the Templeton Foundation with his contemporary Dambisa Moyo as well as written in the press to respond to critics such as Jeffrey Sachs and Ha-Joon Chang.

Biography

Born in West Virginia and raised in Bowling Green, Ohio, Easterly received his BA from Bowling Green State University in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1985. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank and was adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

From 1985 to 2001 he worked at the World Bank as an economist and Senior Adviser at the Macroeconomics and Growth Division. He then worked at the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development until 2003, when he began teaching at NYU. He has worked in many areas of the developing world and some transition economies, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia.

He is the author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), 3 other co-edited books, and 46 articles in refereed economics journals.

His work has been discussed in media outlets such as National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Economist, The New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, and the Christian Science Monitor.

In his papers he introduced the notions of Factor world and Productivity world.

Views

Easterly is skeptical toward many of the trends that are common in the field of foreign aid. In The Elusive Quest for Growth he analyzes the reasons why foreign aid to many third world countries has failed to produce sustainable growth. He reviews the many “panaceas” that have been tried since World War II but had little to show for their efforts. Among them is one that has recently come back into fashion: debt relief. That remedy has been tried many times before, he argues, with negative results more often than positive, and calls for a more scrutinizing process.

In The White Man's Burden (The title referring to the famous The White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling), Easterly elaborates on his views about the meaning of foreign aid. Released in the wake of Live8, the book is critical of people like Bob Geldoff and Bono (“The white band's burden”) and especially of fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs and his bestselling book The End of Poverty. Easterly suspects that such messianic do-good missions are ultimately modern reincarnations of the infamous colonial conceit of yore. He distinguishes two types of foreign aid donors: “Planners”, who believe in imposing top-down big plans on poor countries, and “Searchers”, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian while Searchers are more realistic as they focus — following Karl Popper — on piecemeal interventions. Searchers, according to Easterly, have a much better chance to succeed.

Criticism

Sachs responded to Easterly's arguments, leading to an ongoing debate. Sachs accused Easterly of excessive pessimism, overestimating costs, and overlooking past successes. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has praised Easterly for analysis of the problems of foreign aid, but criticized his sweeping debarment of all plans, lacking the due distinctions between different types of problems, and not giving the aid institutions credit for understanding the points he's making.

Books

• Easterly, William. The Elusive Quest for Growth : Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. The MIT Press, 2001; ISBN 026205065X
• Easterly, William. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press HC, The, 2006; ISBN 1594200378

External links

• Aid Watch A blog written by William Easterly and Laura Freschi of the Development Research Institute
• The Development Research Institute William Easterly's research institute at New York University
• William Easterly on Twitter
• William Easterly on Al Jazeera English's Riz Khan show
• Professional information, as well as published works
• Easterly's expert page at the Brookings Institution
• A Modest Proposal A critical review of Jeffrey Sachs's blueprint for a new foreign aid initiative, "The End Of Poverty."
• Center for Global Development: CGD Experts: William Easterly
• Think Again: Debt Relief
• Abridgements of The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden
• The Man Without a Plan Book review of "White Man's Burden," published in Foreign Affairs.
• The Utopian Nightmare