Easterly's too weak
When economists say they don't know much, I'm always sympathetic. But when they say we will never know anything, that's going too far. William Easterly presented an idea at the LSE tonight: " We don't know how to solve global poverty - and that's a good thing " (thanks to Andrea James for alerting me to this). Part of his logic is impeccable. He argues that democracy, freedom and self-determination are normative goods - and thus, even if we could solve development problems by imposing top-down, autocratic solutions, we should not. Later, he shows some tentative evidence that authoritarianism doesn't even provide economic benefits - at least there's no convincing evidence for it, and there's some to suggest the opposite. So far so good - it's nice to have an argument against the position that countries need (at least temporarily) an autocratic system to kick-start economic growth. The four examples that are often used to support this ...