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Book Review: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and The Forgotten Rights of The Poor
Book Review: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and The Forgotten Rights of The Poor
ß The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
2 of 3 . Book Review
coerced into serving the interests of a higher these themes extensively, and to good effect.
entity, the nation or country. The discourse of development is a main
And third, markets, the rule of law and component of this discussion, with Arturo
social norms were, for Hayek, parts of a Escobar’s work eliciting wide attention in
spontaneous order that nobody designed, development studies and elsewhere. Escobar’s
nobody ordered and that delivers outcomes conclusion, that the whole western notion of
no-one intends. This was related to main- development should be deconstructed out of
stream economics ‘general equilibrium’, a self- existence, to allow space for alternative ima-
regulating system that no-one controls. ginaries of social change to be articulated by
Myrdal, by comparison, was for government social movements, is especially germane to
as the active subject in planning development. Easterly’s ‘free development’. Then too, the
Easterly insists Hayek’s position has long been Western liberalism championed by Hayek, and
misunderstood as merely a case of states versus now Easterly, has been subject to intense
markets, whereas Hayek was actually for some critical scrutiny, especially in terms of the
state intervention and government provision highly unequal distributions of income it
literature could be summarized as ‘the global of an alternative ‘free’ development (the right
dictatorship of Hayekian neo-liberalism’. of rich individuals to make even more money)
None of this is even mentioned in Easterly’s is a total mistake that could be made only by a
book. So, new wave economics is conceived theorist hopelessly over-committed to meth-
in intellectual isolation from social theory—an odological individualism.
isolation permitted and re-enforced by the
power relations among the social sciences,
with economics at the top. Easterly’s criti- Richard Peet
cisms of authoritarian development are often Clark University
right on. But turning to Hayek for his theory rpeet@clarku.edu