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

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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is November 11, 2025, and my guest is economist and author William Easterly.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  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 Econ Talk.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Thank you, Russ. Pleasure to be here.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  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 as saying, you know, 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,

• 2:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  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?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  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 violence, 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

• 3:46Speaker 01

  of liberal thinkers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, later, much later, Martin Luther King, 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.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  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. I want to read a quote from the book, which I really liked, and get us into a... Conversation about some of the concepts in this 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

• 5:01Speaker 00

  development, country-led development, and consultations with stakeholders in 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?" Close quote. And I want to, well, first, let's talk about agency.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  What does that word mean to you? And why do you talk about it there?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, one little problem with agency is it is itself a jargon word that doesn't carry a lot of emotional possess. You know, we don't see marches of political dissidents holding up words saying, "We want agency." You know, 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, you know, here's our, 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 kind of run your own lives, your own right

• 6:34Speaker 01

  to self-determination, which we can call agency. And liberal thinkers reacted, and thinkers in the rest of the world reacted to this deal thing. You know, 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.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  That's for sure.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  And even though the early, at various times, the material well-being 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.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  You're saying that that something greater, we should always be questioned if it is not what people want.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  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 90s. 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 rise maybe quite rapidly, and yet really be worse off. The citizens are worse off, because you take away their freedom in such an 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.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And so, you know, 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 with our GDP. They must be better off." That's the kind of point of view that this book really wants to attack. You know, 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 liberal thinkers and liberal resistors in the rest of the world identified during its 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

• 9:46Speaker 01

  violent actors like Lenin and Stalin, just like they did during the colonial era with Western colonial powers.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  And the argument that that somehow might justify slavery is appalling and just vile.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Because here's a clear case where it is quite possible material income of slaves increased. I'm not making that judgment, but thinkers like Adam Smith to Amartya Sun to the modern economics 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. You know, 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,

• 11:38Speaker 01

  why did you have to use so much force to make them slaves? Why didn't 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." If you slave owners think slavery is so benevolent, why don't you want it for yourself? So again, we see sort of the criteria of choice and consent as being the key benchmark of well-being and not some supposedly objective indicator like GDP or material consumption.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  There's a long essay series here on the Library of Economics and Liberty, the host of Econ Talk, on the role economists played in fighting against slavery. It was written by David Levy and Sandra Perd, which you referenced their book.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's a matter of their work.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  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 Perd, supported slavery, and the economists were often the ones who fought against it. In particular, economics was called the dismal silence by Thomas Carlyle, not because it has too many equations and leads to unpleasant exams, but because it failed to recognize that...

• 13:07Speaker 00

  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 economist's role was in respecting the dignity of every human being.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Carlisle was a big proponent of benevolent slavery, that this supposedly paternalistic thing by slave owners that raised the role being of the slaves. But Carlisle's big opponent was John Stuart Mill, the great liberal economist. And Mill said explicitly, "I'm not going to dispute with Carlisle, you know, the scientific facts about whether material income went up or not. I could dispute that, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to address that. I'm going to address the morality of the argument. It's like the ethical, normative content of the argument, and not the supposedly scientific debate about whether income went up or not."

• 14:18Speaker 01

  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. You know, again, if you, if you slave owners are so great for the slaves, why, why do they run away? And Imarcha Sen said the same thing two centuries later. You know, 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.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  If they resist, you know, some solutions because they think that solution makes them worse off. 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.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  I'm going to come back to the quote I read a bit ago, 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 in 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 more generally for

• 15:54Speaker 00

  a minute, and think about a wide variety of factors that many people have put forward to improve on the concept of, say, material well-being 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 that surely the best we can do is to measure material progress. That's the economist's job. And, you know, I think about issues like universal basic

• 16:37Speaker 00

  income, where people argue that poverty today is just 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?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Well, of course, the modern equivalent of what you're saying might be the benevolent aristocrats' 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're a good thing. And then the big question is, who gets to decide that?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  You know, and I think one of the points here is that it's really impossible to do this kind of value-free development idea. You know, 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, you know, "I judge for these people that only poverty matters to them, and things like dignity and self-respect and agency, you know, 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, you know, measuring those things, so I'm just going to concentrate on the measurable thing." That's fine, but who are you to decide that?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Another thing I'd add to that list that people might care about beyond material well-being is family. You know, we've talked a lot on the program about people who stay in economically depressed areas because, 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.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  And I will comment on that first. I have a follow-up question.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  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, you know, very family-oriented.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  And the comment is, you know, "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. Then we come back to the issue, you know, who are we as outside Western experts parachuting in to decide for them that, you know, funerals and weddings are a low priority, and something else, you know, like education should be a high priority for them? You know, 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 hysteria, and that's

• 20:17Speaker 01

  why I'm, you know, resorting so much to more extreme examples to at least get us to acknowledge that. And 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.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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

• 21:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  And which I'm not, I'm not, I don't like that. So help me out or disagree.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I also, for myself, don't want to go to the other extreme and, you know, 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, my opinion is sort of like, let them eat agency.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  There you go. But, and so, you know, it's important that, yes, we all recognize, we, meaning whoever's in this debate, that, yes, material income is extremely important. Disease and famine are extremely important. All evading those things, you know, is extremely important. And some people are in such extreme circumstances that probably are, 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, care about dignity and agency and not about your material income. That's not for me to decide. The principle is always the same. You know, who are we,

• 23:07Speaker 01

  by the way, who's included in this we? Let's talk about that some. But who are, who are we to decide for others what their goals should be?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  I'm going 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 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?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  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, quote, "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

• 24:47Speaker 00

  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," and now you're quoting Smith, I think, "trade carries out that surplus part of the produce of their land and labor for which there is no demand among them, and brings back in return for it something else for which there is a demand." Close quote from Adam Smith.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  You add, the crucial word here is "demand." Which, meaning, close quote, meaning, something they want. And then you point out, which I've never seen before, variations on the noun "choice" or verb "choose" occur 48 times in The Wealth of Nations, usually referring to individual choice. Smith mentions consent 24 times. So I just, I love that. If you want to add anything about mercantilism, you may.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think two points. One is that mercantilism is another example of some objective indicator of progress. It has nothing to do with what people want, but just what some, some expert thinks is a good measure of progress. In this case, a really stupid one, as you explained. And 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, that way is trade, commerce.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  You know, commerce and trade, we, either domestic, in domestic markets or, you know, with foreign countries and foreign agents, you know, we, we take, like your, like your quote that you just gave, we take something we want, exchange for something we give to them that they want. In fact, there really, in this case, there is no paternalism, there is no coercion, you know, we just both freely engage in a trade that we both think makes us better off. So that, that is the big engine that Smith saw as available to, 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.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  He said about the Western conquests of the Americas, of the New World, he said, "Oh, this is so tragic, because, you know, we could have just engaged in trade with these peoples." We could have taken from that, there, there are big opportunities for trade, you know, 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.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  And there are these big opportunities for trade, but instead of concentrating on trade, the West concentrated on violent conquest, dispossession, coercion. And so, you know, the native peoples in the Americas were made much worse off when they could have been made better off. That was, you know, 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.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Well, that's a very powerful statements in the Theory of World 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. I want to, 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,

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Kant, in his writings, counterbalanced what it means to be a human against violations of dignity. And here's the Kant quote, "As a person, homo numenum, he is not to be valued merely as a means to the end of others, even to his own ends, but as an end in itself it is. He possesses a dignity, an absolute inner worth, by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world." 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.

• 29:37Speaker 01

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

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Lovely. I want to ask you about an important part of the liberal movement from both economists, philosophers, and others. 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, as later,

• 30:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  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?

• 31:17Speaker 01

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

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I made that up.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  It was already shifting in the late 19th century with Alfred Marshall and the founders of the American Economic Association in the US. They were already saying, you know, we don't want moral debates, we just want scientific analysis of what raises GDP. And 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've lost, and you know, 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, you know, in the late, with the original founders of the American Economic Association, as Thomas Leonard has so eloquently shown.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  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. You know, going all the way back to Adam Smith, but in more modern times, it was Pete Thibaut, the great development economist, saying, "Freedom should be an end in itself." Milton Friedman saying, "Freedom should be an end in itself." And Marcusson coming along, writing a book, "Development is 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

• 32:55Speaker 01

  what they were saying, even to acknowledge what they were saying. You know, when you read reviews of Bauer and Friedman's books, the reviewers never say, you know, "Well, you know, 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 effect of liberty on material GDP, and, you know, primarily that.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  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 contributes. I think, you know, 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.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been on the other side of this debate. Not quite the other side, depends on how you define the side. But, you know, when you argue about, say, 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 it doesn't, the freedom argument in the modern world gets no traction. You want to speculate about why that is?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  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?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think maybe we recognize that moral debates are maybe in some way harder to win than scientific debates. Because, you know, who's 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, you know, how are we going to counteract that, except maybe using the strategies of the Western liberals? Maybe we can appeal to reciprocity. You know, if you want freedom for yourself, then, you know, shouldn't you, you know, not be hypocritical, shouldn't you also want freedom for others?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And I think this low profile of freedom is mainly about wanting freedom for others. You know, we're reluctant to admit that others might want freedom. Usually, we do have a lot more moral clarity about wanting freedom for ourselves.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And I think that's the failures, that we failed 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. You know, the only hopeful thing I would say about that, Russ, and this is another

• 36:49Speaker 01

  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, supposedly benevolent slavery did end, colonialism did end, new conquests mainly ended, the 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.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 classical liberals, as advocates of liberty and freedom, but in the end, freedom is advancing.

• 38:10Speaker 00

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

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not going to say that's some inexorable, irreversible thing either.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  I just want to mention, what?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  So far, over the last few centuries, it advanced a lot.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  I just want to mention three episodes that come to mind on these topics that we have. We'll put links up to them. We have the interview. We have an interview with Thomas Leonard, who you just mentioned. We have the interview with Mike Munger, which 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 shout out to a very old episode we did with Bruce Blain and Demascheta on the Congo, where he talks about King Leopold as a tyrant. And that raises the question, you know, who was the

• 39:09Speaker 00

  real King Leopold, the one in the Congo or the one who was revered in Belgium as a moderate and a reformer? And, you know, 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. 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

• 39:50Speaker 00

  we've talked about a number of times on the program, the idea that there are people who have an idealized view of the world, a system, and who want to move people around in life as if they were chess pieces. But Fred 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

• 40:34Speaker 00

  more laissez-faire perspective than I would have expected, ex Andy. So talk about that.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he does not get enough recognition as a major liberal thinker with, you know, a tremendous perspective of himself being a former slave and very much in turn with, you know, slaves and ex-slaves. Because, you know, 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, like, anti-poverty plan for how to help slaves or maybe what to do with them after they're liberated." And, you know, I don't apologize for that.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  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, you know, supposedly benevolent slavery. And another huge movement in the U.S. 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, you know, going to Liberia after being emancipated from slavery. And, you know, as Douglass is saying, you know, "So far, you've offered benevolent slavery

• 42:09Speaker 01

  and forced expulsion from the U.S. to Liberia. You know, no, thank you. We don't need any more, you know, crazy plans for what you whites want to do with us Black people." And that continued even after the Civil War, when, you know, white attempts to help the freedmen were very well-intentioned and good, but Douglass said, "You know, 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?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  You know, can't you recognize our own efforts and not just treat us as paternalistic wards of white philanthropy?" So he stated those views very, 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 Douglas had something else, 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

• 43:35Speaker 01

  even after emancipation.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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's always better than nothing.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Now, 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 a very good advice for a national policy experiment, but comment about that.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think you and I are on a quest for the least popular arguments in modern policy debates. 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, you will always choose B. Do something to make it worse is still better than doing nothing.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And I think that's sort of, you know, if you think of any debate that modern policy is having, I think that's not too much of a caricature.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  So in our lifetime...

• 45:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  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?

• 46:52Speaker 00

  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?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  As a huge objective, and of course, that is an objective that often is consistent with the consent principle. You know, 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, you know, less hunger, less disease, less poverty. And so, there are many times when 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, with that argument. But the argument, I think, is more that, why should that be the only thing? You know, can you at least get, create a little bit of space for something else that

• 48:26Speaker 01

  there's a lot of, you know, 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, you're, you know, we want to concentrate on material poverty, we as development experts, you know, that's what, that's all that we know how to do." You know, it'd be a lot more convenient for us if you just didn't raise this whole, all this, you know, stuff about dignity and agency and self-determination and consent, because we don't know how to do anything about that, and, you know, we're mainly looking for views

• 49:09Speaker 01

  of the world that make our kind of approach to economic development kind of feasible and comfortable. And so, you know, that's where, that's where we as development experts tend to wind up, including, you know, those who do have a lot of sympathy with freedom. So this is not an easy, it's not an easy question. I don't want to just say it's easy, you know, just say consent, consent, consent, everything easy and everything goes away. There are trade-offs, there's always in economics. How much could more emphasis be put on...

• 49:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  That certainly, you know, we cannot minimize the effect on a family, on a couple, on a mother, of having, you know, 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, you know, reducing material poverty. And so this admission that something else does matter, I think, is what is needed here. It's not just saying, 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?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Because it certainly seems that it does matter to those who are under the receiving end of agency and freedom and coercion.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Very well said. I want to say something about paternalism, and 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. Yeah, I always say that...

• 51:50Speaker 00

  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. You know, in ancient times, allegedly, I don't know if it was true, it could be a myth,

• 52:33Speaker 00

  but say Victorian times, you know, children, quote, "knew their place," and then 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, they, like we did as children, we all were, they want freedom. They want to be, 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.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  And I think it's very hard for most parents. So there's this weird paradox in human life, which is that we've all been, 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're, 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...

• 53:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  I'm glad you raised the childhood example. Because, first of all, this was a favorite metaphor of those who advocated, you know, Western conquest as a good thing for the rest. It's like very much the metaphor that, and there was this awful phrase used, the child races. You know, 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, you know, Africa, claiming to lift up Native American tribes in the US.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  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 needy, 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. Nobody likes to be treated as, no adult likes to be treated as a child. In fact, I think you and I, Russ, probably recognize 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.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  And I said, that certainly resonates with my experience as a father and grandfather. So, you know, 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, you know, your whole ethnic group is a child, or children, which is even worse, because it's denying you, you know, any hope of being an adult, because your ethnic group, which is, you can't change, irrevocably makes you a child. And so that is another reason why during colonial times,

• 56:34Speaker 01

  this demand for respect and agency was so powerful, so visceral at that level.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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 will 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,

• 58:06Speaker 00

  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. It's deeply depressing and I think a common challenge and problem we face when trying to give people freedom and agency.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And I think this is a kind of deeper level of like metta consent in some way. You should have the right to consent to how much you want to emphasize the right to consent. You should have the ability to choose between these, among these goals, and how much weight to put on each one of consent, agency, and material relief from poverty, and security, and 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.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  That's yet again another example of extreme paternalism and treating them like a child.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's remarkable how hard that is.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  You know, it's a form of hubris, self-righteousness, ego. And I, you know, 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's a remarkable asymmetry in logic. It's not a good thing.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  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 was a lot of stereotypes about sort of violent Africans and child soldiers and universal war in Africa, which, you know, I think of one Ugandan blogger named TMS Rugi, R-U-G-E, who said, you know, "Don't these efforts recognize the agency of Ugandans to make their own choices, the

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  efforts of Ugandans on their own to fight Joseph Kony, which they have 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, "You know, well, I think these African intellectuals are conveying the views of educated people that they want, they want respect. And, you know, I think the victims of the war just want to be rescued from Joseph Kony, and there's nothing wrong with these NGO efforts to rescue them from Joseph Kony." And, you know, both sides have valid points to make, but I think Kristof was sort of

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  deciding on behalf of Africans that he didn't think that most Africans cared about agency and kind of dismissive of those who did as just these unrepresentative educated individuals. You know, like, we could talk more about other examples of that, like Dambisa Moyo and Magatwe, who also emphasize dignity and respect and fighting stereotypes in Africa a lot. And so I think this debate between Kristoff and those thinkers, also Tedjou Cole, who wrote this argument at the time about the white savior industrial complex in Africa, which Kristoff also violently rejected, was again saying, this is just the viewpoint

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  of some educated African that has this kind of unnatural attachment to their own dignity.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  My guest today has been William Easterly. His book is Violent Saviors. Bill, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Thanks, Russ.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.