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In December 2018, the WSJ did an interview with William Easterly, who is a development economist at NYU. When Mr. Easterly started work for the World Bank, the “dominant view favored heavy-handed, top-down planning,” as many experts saw poor countries as blank slates ready for their technocratic plan.
Unsurprisingly, the development leaders were enamored with central planning, that doled out their technocratic genius like a “benevolent dictators.” Within time, Easterly realized that state-driven approaches were inferior to those market-driven plans. In Ghana, their leaders supported economic freedom allowing the market work, which it did. In fact, he calls the United Nation as “a very ineffective club of dictators.
In most cases, the World Bank ended up just giving loans to really bad governments. Essentially, the World and International Monetary Fund never designed aid program incentives for countries to grow their economy. These aid programs were simply expected to provide a silver bullet to issues such as population control that didn’t resolve any of the underlying problems. As a writer, Mr. Easterly wrote a book, entitled “The Tyranny of Experts: Economist, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor,” where he discusses the failures of the aid and development communities.