[FOR INTERNAL REVIEW] Bill Easterly - What We Get Wrong About Foreign Aid

The story of foreign aid is usually told as a story of insufficient resources. Bill Easterly thinks that misses the point.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Bill Easterly, NYU economist and author of four books on development, to dig into why aid so often fails, and why the problem runs deeper than most people are willing to admit.

Topics covered:

• From disappointment to concern: how Easterly's view of foreign aid evolved from "zero effect" to actively harmful, particularly through its support of autocrats
• The accountability problem: why aid agencies are accountable to US foreign policy goals rather than to the people they're meant to help, and how that shapes everything
• Why even well-intentioned private philanthropy ends up in the same traps
• The "benevolent autocrat" fallacy: why GDP growth under coercive regimes doesn't constitute development
• Why development as freedom, not just material income is the right framework, and what historical cases reveal about the limits of GDP-first thinking
• The problem with "we": who gets to be included in that word, what it conceals about power and paternalism
• Coercion vs. exploitation

About Bill Easterly: Bill Easterly is a former World Bank economist, professor of economics at NYU and co-director of the Development Research Institute.

Check out Bill’s books:

The Elusive Quest for Growth

The White Man’s Burden

The Tyranny of Experts

Violent Saviors

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