So I finished the second third of The Tyranny of Experts. This part was about the “Blank Slate” – this notion that non-Western countries are masses of chaos just waiting for a technocrat to come along and impose the order which automatically yields improvements in education, health, and economics. Easterly illustrated this with Bill Gates' myopic reliance on the temporary decrease in child mortality rates over five years in Ethiopia as conclusive proof of effective autocratic governance.
What the
book says
Basically,
prioritization of individual or autocratic rights hundreds of years
ago carries implications for current matters such as trade,
democracy, and rates of organ donation. For example, medieval free
cities with histories of individual rights, commerce, and government
by a council of rotating members were better prepared to fight
against military intervention than autocratically-governed societies
with a “collectivist” (read: conformist and non-challenging)
citizen experience. So one result of a collective versus individual
focus is incentives – people with an individual investment will be
more driven to defend their rights and society and resources than
people who are spending half their time working for others' benefit.
The other
result is what happens following an encounter with someone from
outside your group. Easterly claims that collectivist groups are
less able to incorporate outside influence, given their heavy
reliance on in-network information and the extent to which members'
trust is restricted to other in-group members. A society operating
with these limitations can't easily interact with individuals from
outside the society, since the structures for resolving conflict with
non-group members don't exist. We see the legacy of these
limitations among certain groups in Benin, which centuries ago
exported their own members as slaves and are now correlated with
present lower levels of trust than that displayed by comparable
groups, and fall further behind the rest of the world economically
year by year.
The point is
that individual rights are not an end in themselves but become
relevant as a means to ensuring prerequisites to development. So in
other words, relying on voting rates to measure the success of
democracy programs is futile, especially at the expense of ignoring
broader goals such as diversity of representation.
Easterly
then traces the developmental advantages of North American countries
(where those who controlled the government did so in the name of the
majority) to the democratically-derived incentives for investment in
the public good, and uses the example of public health to illustrate
the difference. For example, the same child mortality rates which
Gates misinterprets in Ethiopia shows the impact of democracy (or
lack thereof) on public problems in Colombia – where the
self-perpetuating political elite that represented a minority of
citizens never had an incentive to invest in health measures for the
majority's benefit – and in the US, where the city government of
New York had a choice of responding to the multi-faceted problem it
faced or being thrown out of office. In other words, while the
governing minority in Colombia could rest secure in its remove from
the unwashed masses, the government in New York was answerable to the
same masses, and had to figure out how to provide adequate
sanitation, resources, and public information to overcome the
poverty, pollution, and political stagnation which contributed to
public health crises and high levels of child mortality.
What it
doesn't
So three cheers
for individual rights and the associated advantages in development!
But.
The most
eyeroll-inducing oversight in the section is also pretty offensive,
not to mention being rather ironic if your goal is advocating for
individual rights. While Easterly makes much of the difference
between societies governed by members of the majority (North America)
versus members of the minority (South America), I guess it escapes
his attention how the majority in North America came to be in the
majority to begin with. (Hint: Genocide.) I mean, if you want to
talk about the fallacy of the Blank Slate, your failure to
acknowledge the population of a whole continent as it existed up to a
few centuries ago seems pretty exemplary. Sure, the government which
eventually came to power may have acted in the best interest of the
majority, but that's only after some pretty severe interference with
the individual rights of everybody the government was in the process
of murdering at the time.
I guess this
kind of leads to the question of “so what?” I'm not sure if this
omission changes the analysis, but on the other hand, as a reader
this isn't a question I should have to be asking. At the very least
I think this question is liable to undermine a reader's trust,
particularly given that Easterly's whole effort in this book is to
make the novel case that the rights of oppressed individuals cannot
be trampled for the sake of development.
At the other
end of the “individualness” spectrum comes the rights of
corporations. Easterly establishes that political freedom includes
checks on government power against individuals, and that we can
expect more individual protections in mature democracies against the
threat of tyranny by the majority. But what happens when
corporations become persons and use their vast political resources to
their advantage? What are the democratic protections in that
instance? I guess the issue becomes whether “corporate people”
are viewed as a creation of statute or an inevitable consequence of
the democratic process. The latter hardly seems plausible, so maybe
the answer is that the correct response to bad politics is more
politics.
So in the next
section I get to see if there's an answer to another of my questions:
In the contest between individual v. nations' rights, is there any
validity to viewing nations as a stand-in for the well-being of the
national population? Since I'm starting a new job next week I'll be
trying to power through that section of the book in the upcoming days
so I can get off the edge of my seat. Stay tuned...
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