Development from the Bottom Up
On June 23, the Development Research Institute at New York University was presented with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Development Cooperation. William Easterly and Yaw Nyarko, the co-directors of the Institute, traveled to Spain (where the BBVA financial group is based) to accept the 400,000 euro prize. The Institute, which has been supported since 2008 by a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation, was cited by the BBVA jury for “its contribution to the analysis of foreign aid provision and its challenge to the conventional wisdom in development assistance.”
The Development Research Institute (DRI) was founded, according to Easterly, “to bring mainstream economic thought about free markets to the development establishment.” He argues that aid agencies, NGOs, and even private donors have been “mired in a way of thinking that is in the intellectual tradition of collectivist thought. They believe that central planning is how to do aid and economic development.” Easterly set out this critique in detail in his much-discussed 2006 book, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
DRI’s research focuses on entrepreneurship, individual freedom, free enterprise, and free competition. The Institute aims to educate the public about these issues by targeting leaders in academia and the aid establishment. It also hopes to train scholars from the developing world at programs in their own regions, with an emphasis on the role of enterprise in solving economic problems.
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| VIDEO: William Easterly |
Easterly advocates a more skeptical mindset when it comes to helping the poor in other countries. What matters, he suggests, is whether a society has the right rules in place and values to make possible decentralized entrepreneurship. Only then can a country begin to solve other problems like public health and education. “We are really pushing the idea that this is a bottom-up process of creation,” he says. “And we are starting to win this argument.” (For a short video interview with Easterly, click here.)
Easterly and his team have been making their case on a number of fronts. They regularly publish papers in academic journals and op-eds in major newspapers. They also have a blog called AidWatch that calls attention to both good and bad examples of foreign aid. (You can follow them on Twitter as well, at @aidwatch and @bill_easterly.)
This month, the Institute will release a paper written by Easterly and a postdoctoral fellow that rates aid agencies on how they perform according to the best and worst practices in the field. The motto of AidWatch is “just asking that aid benefit the poor,” and that, to Easterly’s mind, is a standard that is too often ignored. It can be difficult to measure directly, but Easterly and DRI have made a start by asking, for instance, how much money from an agency ends up in the hands of a corrupt dictator. The paper also discusses the social and political environment in which aid professionals operate. Easterly worries that the people working in development “don’t have an incentive to give strong feedback, their incentive is to invest a lot in public relations.”
Mauro De Lorenzo, JTF’s vice president for freedom and free enterprise, explains the Foundation’s interest in the work of DRI: “Sir John Templeton believed that expanding free enterprise and entrepreneurship were the only proven way to prevent future poverty. Bill Easterly has brought this perspective into the mainstream development debate like never before.”
SOLD: Fighting the New Global Slave Trade
The Lighthouse International Film Festival recently featured the new documentary SOLD: Fighting the New Global Slave Trade, which profiles three modern abolitionists. Produced, written, and directed by Jody Hassett Sanchez, the film follows a Christian woman in rural Togo, a former Hindu nun in India, and a Muslim attorney in Pakistan as they try to rescue women and children from exploiters and to push local and national governments to fight the problem.
With the support of a three-year, $225,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Sanchez and her team are drawing attention not only to the estimated 27 million people enslaved in the world today, but also to the hopeful stories of individuals fighting for their freedom. “We want people to be outraged by the problem,” says Sanchez, “but also to be inspired by these three extraordinary abolitionists. Each of them battles a different virulent variety of slavery with humor, grace, righteous anger, and unflagging determination.”
Sanchez, a former producer for ABC News and CNN, hopes that viewers “will applaud, rather than pity, the former slaves in our film. These individuals are living testimony to the possibility that even the most broken of us can be restored, even transformed.” SOLD will be broadcast this fall by several international networks, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and EBS in South Korea. Sanchez will also tour universities and colleges across the U.S. to screen the film and to hold conversations about it.
Reviving Capitalism
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| VIDEO: Matthew Bishop |
Matthew Bishop, co-author of The Road from Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top, was the featured guest at a recent Templeton Book Forum in New York City. Bishop, the U.S. business editor and the New York bureau chief of the Economist, was interviewed by R. Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School and the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. Video of the discussion is now available on the website of
C-Span2’s BookTV, which recorded and broadcast the event.
