Arrested Development: economists who set out to help the world's poor may actually be part of the problem.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor - Book review

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, by William Easterly, Basic Books, 394 pages, $29.99

"I can sympathize with economists who, in their zeal to help the world's poor, unwittingly favor autocracy," writes William Easterly in his new book The Tyranny of Experts, "because for a long time I was one of them myself."

Easterly, the head of New York University's Development Research Institute, has become one of the loudest dissenters against the popular view that government-to-government foreign aid is the best way to improve the lot of the globe's worst off. Development economics, he argues, overprivileges autocratic central planning and neglects the benefits of the spontaneous free play of markets and their proven powers to increase wealth. This leads development experts to disrespect the rights of the poor.

Easterly aims neither to blame nor to shame development economists for their discipline's original sin. But he doesn't pull punches when it comes to telling their intellectual history. Between 1919 and 1949, he explains, "development ideas took shape while racism and colonialism still reigned supreme." Easterly offers up mini-histories of how development economists acted in China between the world wars, Colombia after World War II, and Africa during and after World War II (where, Easterly writes, "African leaders...inherited] the role of benevolent autocrat from the defunct [British] empire").

A United Nations Primer for Development from 1951 sums up the mandarins' perspective on development, government, and citizens: "We wish to emphasize that the masses...take their cue from those who are in authority over them.... [I]f the leaders win the confidence of the country ... they can inspired the masses with an enthusiasm for progress which carries all before it ... all problems of economic development are soluble."

The bad ideas Easterly chronicles

are unsavory in both moral and scientific terms. They tend to treat migration of peoples away from the Third World as some unthinkable betrayal, a notion captured in the oft-repeated phrase brain drain. Instead of lamenting the loss, he says, economists should focus on the individuals who have chosen to better their circumstances through a process that helps protect rights while alleviating poverty.

To illustrate the absurdity of the argument, Easterly presents the amusing reductio of the "Lost Republic of West Virginia," from which his own family...