Forgotten Rights Of The Poor

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In today's world, billions lack the goods of healthcare, of rapid transit, of modern communication technology, and of ease of access to basic necessities often taken for granted in industrialized nations. William Easterly in his work, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, addresses the responses of industrialized society to this gross inequality and contends the "technocratic" approach of advising (and funding) technical autocratic development policies the development community has historically claimed to be the most effective approach to development produces at best little to no economic benefit for the peoples of those nations being aided. Easterly argues the development community has erroneously …show more content…

While the efforts of developers have aided the lives of billions, none would claim the amount of humanitarian aid administered has raised the living standards of the vast majority of the poor even close to that of industrialized nations and for a large proportion of the poor even to a state of adequately possessing basic necessities including food, clean water, and clothing. Even wealthy nations must struggle to finance the consumption of crucial modern goods such as healthcare and information technology. It is doubtful then the small fractions of wealthy nations' income being donated to the impoverished will be sufficient to fill a significant share of this material gulf of inequality between rich and poor nations. The goods humanitarians wish for the poor can only be produced in satisfactory quantities by the currently poor peoples themselves in economies in which they are valued, productive participants. The question then is whether sending aid to autocracies controlling destitute nations serves this greater goal of economically enabling the impoverished or does little more than prop up the level of development in poor autocratic nations. To answer this question, we again invoke Easterly's …show more content…

As evidenced by the actions of the Ethiopian dictator, Meles Zenawi, aid can and will be used by rulers with unchecked power to brutally enforce their often antisocial autocratic policies (156-157). Even beyond overt usage of aid as a tool for repression, giving autocracies the opportunity to relieve the physical burdens of their peoples by administering aid can have the effect of appeasing and thus further silencing the impoverished receiving aid, only making the reform and overthrow of those regimes a more difficult, remote possibility. Providing aid to autocracies serves then to exacerbate and entrench antisocial authoritarian policy severely hindering the power of human symbiosis from solving economic problems and thereby generating growth in these

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