Academic

William Easterly thinks that ?home grown? development solutions, attempted by local leaders through ?trial and error? are the only solutions that could make the lives of the poor better. He worked at the World Bank for a long time, and clearly hated being there, because he?s against the use of the bank and the IMF resources to require governments to implement any set of reforms. That?s any. No leveraging loans to insist on free markets, lower internal trade barriers, civil society reforms, human rights, you name it. Easterly thinks that bureaucracy, because it?s a bureaucracy, can?t solve problems ? even the smart development bureaucrats in Washington, and definitely the venal local bureaucrats of the developing world. I vaguely tire of this sort of overkill - are government bureaucrats really so different than corporate bureaucrats for, say, Tata, who do plenty of poverty alleviation? Are their incentives so very different? Easterly appears to buy the whole canard about turf and budget maximization, about which there is very little empirical evidence ? I?ll bet just as much as there is for a division of a water utility. Still, you can listen to him go to town on development aid in this interesting podcast.

But I?m interested in the similarity between Easterly, the development aid skeptic from the right, and Dani Rodrik, the skeptic from the left. Rodrik is also a ?many paths? kind of economist. He is a critic of the Washington Consensus for development. But he believes in development aid, and runs a program that fast tracks its graduates to the IMF and World Bank. Here?s a post by Rodrik on Easterly and vice versa. Is this an example of how very different ideological approaches can end up taking very similar intellectual paths?