Intro. [Recording date: November 11, 2025.]
Russ Roberts: Today is November 11th, 2025, and my guest is economist and author, William Easterly. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University. His latest book is Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest, which is the subject of today’s conversation.
This is Bill’s fourth appearance on the program. He was last here in June of 2014–very long time ago–talking about the tyranny of experts. Bill, welcome back to EconTalk.
William Easterly: Thank you, Russ. Pleasure to be here.
1:11
Russ Roberts: The central idea of this book is captured in its title. It’s a fantastic title. A title that seems like an oxymoron: Violent Saviors. Usually, you think of saviors as being sort of peaceful and helpful, and violent people are people you want to stay away from. Why did you call your book that, and how does that capture what’s going on in the book?
William Easterly: Yeah. Well, one of the big ideas of the book is how much Western conquest of the rest–colonialism in general–was justified by the Western mission to bring development to the rest of the world. So, the conquest of the Americas, of Africa, of Asia, was justified saying, ‘We’re bringing development to these guys, so they’re going to be better off. So, we’re going to be their saviors.’ But, of course, conquest involves violence. You conquer because you defeat the military resistance of the locals, and you maintain your role through violence. So, that’s the oxymoron that the colonizers, the conquistadors, the conquerors were violent saviors, who claimed to be saving, but had to impose violence for the supposed beneficiaries of their saviorhood to accept it.
Russ Roberts: And, what about modern paternalistic attempts to make people better off, which you’ve written about, of course, for a very, very long time? You’re one of the most, I think, influential and articulate voices about the aid industry, and the attempt to improve the lot of the so called “rest”–the so-called Third World. It’s not as violent, but it is a form of saviorhood, or at least purports to be. Do you remain skeptical about that effort?
William Easterly: Yeah. Well, let me say a couple of things about that.
First, I am not going to be equating modern development with violent colonialism. That’s not where I’m going. If anything, it’s the opposite. The emergence of liberalism during the colonial era has made possible the somewhat more benevolent world of development we see today. So, certainly, there is some violence in development today, but it’s obviously much less than it was during the colonial era.
And, I’m not going to be equating some violence with extreme violence. I’m not doing that.
What I am saying is the emergence of liberalism–the emergence of liberal thinkers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, much later on, Amartya Sen–was partly in response to this history of colonial violent saviors. And so, I think understanding the way that Adam Smith and his successors reacted to violent saviors is still helpful for us today, even though we’re not dealing with the same extremes that Adam Smith was dealing with in conquest and slavery.
Russ Roberts: And of course, you’re using the word ‘liberalism’ and ‘liberals’ in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning pro liberty. And, we’ll talk more about why that is a useful way to summarize their position.
4:32
Russ Roberts: I want to read a quote from the book, which I really liked, and it will get us into a conversation about some of the concepts in this excerpt. Quote:
Agency is often seen as a rather arcane concern for people experiencing extreme deprivation. Aid agencies make some effort to recognize agency by deploying even more ponderous jargon like empowerment, community-driven development, participatory development, partnerships for development, country-led development, and consultations with stakeholders and civil society. It is hard to see how the intended beneficiaries of aid really get a voice from all this. Most development debaters turn with relief away from such buzzwords to seek lower poverty rates or a higher number of Christmas turkeys.
But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off, if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress? [Italics original]
Close quote.
Well, first, let’s talk about agency. What does that word mean to you, and why do you talk about it there?
William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, one little problem with agency is it is itself a jargon word that doesn’t carry a lot of emotional pizzazz. We don’t see marches of political dissidents holding up words saying, ‘We want agency.’ We recognize more words like freedom, consent, choice, self-determination. Those words carry a lot more weight.
But ‘agency’ is a more precise word, I think, and that’s why I use it. Because I think what happened with the colonial experiment, it’s like the colonizers were offering, say, ‘Here’s our colonial rule that’s going to offer you guys a lot of development, and all you have to do is give up your right to run your own lives, your own right to self-determination.’ Which we can call agency.
And, liberal thinkers reacted, and thinkers in the rest of the world reacted to this deal saying, ‘No, thank you. You’ve misunderstood us. We don’t just want relief from material poverty. We do want agency. We do want our right to choose our own destinies. We do want the right to consent to our own progress.’ And that’s, I think, what kind of emerged from this colonial history that I delved into.
So, in the end, it wasn’t true that development gave the conquerors the right to conquer.
7:09
Russ Roberts: And, you could also apply that analysis. Most of the book is about various types of colonialism and literal conquests, but, of course, the Communist Revolution, which purported to redeem the economic future of the citizens of, say, the Soviet Union, took away a lot of agency. It took away a lot of freedom. And, even though the early, at various times the material wellbeing of people living under the communist regime was exaggerated, overestimated enormously. So, I think they got poverty without agency. It’s like the worst of both worlds. But there were many, many people who viewed this, the revolution–the Communist Revolution, the Russian Revolution–as a wonderful necessity because ‘if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs,’ as the saying goes. And of course, some freedom was lost, but it was in the name of something greater. You’re saying that that something greater, we should always be questioned if it is not what people want.
William Easterly: Yeah. I did want to talk about Lenin quite a bit in the book, and then later I talk about the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And I think you’re exactly right. I think the Soviet Union is itself a great kind of case study of how you can have GDP [Gross Domestic Product] rise maybe quite rapidly, and yet really be worse off. The citizens are worse off. Because you take away their freedom in such a extreme–I mean, here, we do have extreme violence, huge violence during the Russian Civil War that the Bolsheviks won. Huge violence during Stalin’s five-year plans in the 1930s;, the famine in Ukraine.
And so, the fact that a lot of Western observers just looked at Soviet GDP and said, ‘Oh, yeah, Soviets are catching up with us. The GDP is rising. They’re closing the gap without GDP. They must be better off.’ That’s the kind of point of view that this book really wants to attack. That, we need kind of a broader framework in which we can look at Soviet GDP and not just obsess about the GDP. We need something else. And, that something else is what the liberal thinkers, and the liberal resistors, and the rest of the world identified during this long history: that people, in order to be better off, do need to have the right to consent to the supposed plans that are making them better off by violent actors like Lenin and Stalin, just like they did during the colonial era with Western colonial powers.
Russ Roberts: And of course, the police state, the Gulag–incredible cruelty and violence to maintain the authority of the Soviet regime.
And at the same time, you’re very critical–obviously correctly in my view–of those who would apologize for, say, slavery in the United States, arguing that, well, yeah, sure, it’s repressive, but look how well off many of the slaves are, forgetting the fact that many of them, of course, were not treated well; but some were treated well. And, the argument that that somehow might justify slavery is appalling and just vile.
William Easterly: Yeah. I think the case of supposedly benevolent slavery is like a really important one for liberal thinkers, and also for liberal resistors like Frederick Douglass. Because, here’s a clear case where it is quite possible material income of slaves increased. I’m not making that judgment, but thinkers from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen to the modern economic historian, Robert Fogel, have argued that yes, there’s some evidence that the material consumption was higher relative to, say, those still in Africa, or relative to the white working class.
And so, the liberals did not refute the benevolent slavery argument by saying, ‘Oh, you’re wrong. Material income is really worse.’ That’s not how they refuted it. That’s not the effective argument that ended slavery. The effective argument was saying, ‘Well, if you slave owners are so good for the slaves, why did you have to use so much force to make them slaves? Why did they not just gratefully accept your benevolence?’
And, for that matter, as Abraham Lincoln said, ‘Supposedly benevolent slavery is the only good that people want for other people, but not for themselves.’ You know: If you slave owners think slavery is so benevolent, why don’t you want it for yourself?’
So, again and again, we see sort of the criteria of choice and consent as being the key benchmark of wellbeing, and not some supposedly objective indicator like GDP or material consumption.
12:11
Russ Roberts: There was a long essay series here on the Library of Economics and Liberty [Econlib], the host of EconTalk, on the role economists played in fighting against slavery. It was written by David Levy and Sandra Peart, which, you reference their book, which came out–
William Easterly: [inaudible 00:12:33] their work–
Russ Roberts: It came out of that essay series. It’s fantastic work. Many people we have nice associations with– I won’t name them, but they’re in the work of Levy and Peart–supported slavery, and the economists were often the ones who fought against it.
In particular, economics was called the ‘dismal science’ by Thomas Carlyle–not because it has too many equations and leads to unpleasant exams, but because it failed to recognize that some people deserve to be subjugated. Economists said, ‘No. The so-called savages and uncivilized people that you justify incarcerating and coercively enslaving are no different than the rest of us.’ And, that was a case championed by many great economists. So, talk a little bit about that, and how important the economists’ role was in respecting the dignity of every human being.
William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, Carlyle was a big proponent of benevolent slavery, that this was supposedly a paternalistic thing by slave owners that raised the wellbeing of the slaves. But Carlyle’s big opponent was John Stuart Mill, the great liberal economist. And, Mill said explicitly, ‘I’m not going to dispute with Carlyle the scientific facts about whether material income went up or not. I could dispute that, but I’m not going to address that. I’m going to address the morality of the argument–that’s like the ethical normative content of the argument–and not the supposedly scientific debate about whether income went up or not.’ And so, again, he referred explicitly simply to the liberal principle of consent and choice. Once again, if you and other liberal economists like Harriet Martineau also climbed on board with this, again: If you slave owners are so great for the slaves, why do they run away?
And, Amartya Sen said the same thing two centuries later: Why did the slaves run away if the slavery was so good for them?
So, again, it’s the decision to not use some supposedly objective indicator that outside experts judge as to whether people are better off, like material GDP or consumption, but use the choices of people themselves about measuring what is better off. If they resist some solutions because they think that solution makes them more soft. If they voluntarily accept some solution, then they judge that it makes them better off. And that choice criteria is how we judge progress, not supposedly objective indicators.
15:16
Russ Roberts: I want to come back to the quote I read a minute ago and read the last little part of it, because I think it’s–I want to talk about it a little more broadly. And then we’ll come back to the book directly. You say, quote:
But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress?
Close quote.
So, that quote from you is making the point that you just reiterated: That agency matters, consent matters, people who run away from a situation obviously don’t think it’s a good one.
But, I want to think about it more generally for a minute, and think about a wide variety of factors that many people have put forward to improve on the concept of, say, material wellbeing as a measure of progress.
I often don’t agree with all of those. I have a different list that I would pick. But I’m curious what you feel–not just in this application to people who are enslaved or colonized, but rather: Just the idea is surely the best we can do is to measure material progress. That’s the economists’ job. And, I think about issues like Universal Basic Income, where people argue that poverty today is something we should just accept, and we alleviate it with money. We don’t have to find opportunities for these poor people. We don’t have to educate them. In fact, we’ve often failed to find opportunities. We’ve done a lot of effort on that. So, the best we can do is just relieve their material suffering, and then they’ll be better off. What’s your thought about this generally, when we’re outside the area of slavery and colonization?
William Easterly: Well, of course, the modern equivalent of what you’re saying might be the benevolent autocrats’ argument, which I’ve talked with you about before. The idea that if you have a dictator using a lot of force, but if they raise GDP or reduce poverty rates, then they are a good thing.
And then, the big question is: Who gets to decide that?
And I think one of the points here is that it’s really impossible to do this kind of value-free development idea. This idea that development analysis can be sort of value-free, and we’re just concentrating on poverty. I mean, implicitly, when you do that, you’re saying, ‘I judge for these people that only poverty matters to them, and things like dignity and self-respect and agency, I implicitly judge that those don’t matter.’
That’s what you’re implicitly doing when you’re saying, ‘Well, I can’t do anything about measuring those things, so I’m just going to concentrate on the measurable thing.’
That’s fine, but who are you to decide that? Who are you to decide for other people that you only want to concentrate on the aspect of their needs that you think you want to deal with? And you’re not going to recognize the needs that you don’t want to deal with?
Implicitly, you are making a value judgment. And, at least maybe it’s a valid value judgment, but at least you should admit that you’re making a value judgment.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Another thing I’d add to that list that people might care about beyond material wellbeing is family. We’ve talked a lot on the program about people who stay in economically depressed areas either because they’re comfortable there, they know and understand the norms and mores of that society, or they want to be near their family–their parents, their siblings–and the idea that somehow they’re making a mistake because they won’t move. And, well, comment on that, first; then[?] I have a follow-up question.
William Easterly: Yeah. A more kind of low-key example of that is poor people are often criticized for spending so much on weddings and funerals, which obviously are very family-oriented. And, the comment is, ‘Oh, if only they had spent that money on their own education, or investing in cows, or whatever, they’d be better off.’ So, they’re being irrational, spending so much on weddings and funerals.
But then, when we come back to the issue: Who are we, as outside Western experts parachuting in, to decide for them that funerals and weddings are a low priority, and something else like education should be a high priority for them? Who are we to decide that for them? The sort of ‘deciding things for them’ is the thing that’s bothering me the most about this area, and that’s why I’m resorting so much to more extreme examples to at least get us to acknowledge that, at least in some cases, that mindset really leads us badly astray.
So, let’s think about whether it’s leading us astray in these more mild cases that we have today.
20:33
Russ Roberts: I was once called by a reporter who wants to know my opinion of sending money from the United States to, let’s say, Africa–I can’t remember the exact situation, but some country in Africa–to improve their school system. And I said I was against it–to the horror of this reporter who judged me for not caring. And I said, ‘We can’t even spend money effectively in our own country, where we presumably know something about the people in the school system and the actors and players. The idea that we could spend money abroad in an alien culture, in a foreign country, is hubris.’
And I still believe that.
But I also worry–and I’m curious what your take on this is–I also worry that dismissing opportunities like that is sometimes convenient because it takes me out of being responsible for helping people. And I think, of course, there’s a different argument that: Yeah, you can’t be responsible. They have to be responsible for themselves.
But again, I’m always worrying that that gives me an excuse for not being involved–which, I don’t like that. So, help me out, or disagree.
William Easterly: Yeah. I mean, I also, for myself, don’t want to go to the other extreme, and me decide for poor people that they should care about agency and not about material income. Obviously, all of us, I can just imagine some debate opponent characterizing my opinion is sort of like ‘Let them eat agency.’
Russ Roberts: Exactly, yeah. There you go.
William Easterly: And so, it’s important that: yes, we all recognize–‘we’ meaning whoever is in this debate–that yes, material income is extremely important. Disease and famine are extremely important. Alleviating those things is extremely important. And, some people are in such extreme circumstances that probably it is the case that the most urgent necessity is just material immediate relief. It’s quite possible that is. And, it’s not for me to, again, impose on someone else saying, ‘I want you to care about dignity and agency and not about your material income.’ That’s not for me to decide. The principle is always the same: Who are we–by the way, who is included in this ‘we’? Let’s talk about that, some–but: Who are we to decide for others what their goal should be?
23:17
Russ Roberts: I want to digress for a minute because there was a conversation–it’s not a literal digression–but there’s a conversation in the book about Adam Smith and mercantilism. And, I just want to read this because I thought it was such a beautiful, simple set of observations. Now, mercantilism, I’m pretty sure it starts–as far as I remember, when I used to look in, care about this more–I think it starts around the 13th century. And, I always like to mention that when people make fun of me for appealing, say, to Adam Smith or David Ricardo about trade policy, criticizing my view by saying, ‘Well, that is hundreds of years old. Come on, haven’t we learned more since then? Shouldn’t we care about, say, the trade balance?’ And, I say, ‘Well, that concern is actually even older.’ It’s about 800 years old, and I think it was wrong. But, mercantilism never dies. It has an appeal; and I just want to read this quote here.
And you say,
Mercantilist views are still around today, as if the object of policy should be to make everything at home. Smith’s original insight is as compelling as ever. If achieving trade surpluses is the goal, there is an unresolvable conflict between nations. If one nation is running a surplus, one or more other nations must be running a trade deficit. Mercantilism sees trade as a zero-sum game. Policymakers compete with each other to make their nation the one with the trade surplus by restricting imports. The competition will kill off international trade and both sides will be worse off.
Smith defined progress by what people wanted rather than by what the mercantilist experts said they should want. Trade “carries out” [Russ Roberts: And now, you’re quoting Smith, I think–] Trade “carries out that surplus part of the produce of their land and labour for which there is no demand among them, and brings back in return for it something else for which there is a demand.” [Russ Roberts: Close quote from Adam Smith. You add–] The crucial word here is “demand.”
Which, meaning something they want.
And then you point out, which I’ve never seen before:
Variations on the noun “choice” or verb “choose” occur forty-eight times in The Wealth of Nations, usually referring to individual choice. Smith mentions “consent” twenty-four times.
So, I love that. If you want to add anything about mercantilism, you may.
William Easterly: Yeah. Well, I think two points. One is that mercantilism is another example of some objective indicator of progress that has nothing to do with what people want, but just what some experts think is a good measure of progress. In this case, a really stupid one, as you explain.
Second, I think it’s really important–this is really a big crucial point–that when Smith was emphasizing consent and choice so much, he saw a clear way to achieve that kind of mutual consent that is a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum game. And that way is trade. Commerce. Commerce and trade, we–either in domestic markets or with foreign countries and foreign agents.
Like your quote that you just gave, we take something we want in exchange for something we give to them that they want. In fact, in this case, there is no paternalism. There is no coercion. We just both freely engage in a trade that we both think makes us better off.
So, that is the big engine that Smith saw as available to the world to make possible this principle of consent. One big way to make possible the principle of consent. And, that in turn informed his critique of colonialism. He said about the Western conquest of the Americas, of the New World, he said: ‘Oh, this is so tragic because we could have just engaged in trade with these peoples. We could have taken from that. There are big opportunities for trade.’ We now know about goods like chocolate that were invented in the New World that people in Europe turned out to want quite a lot.
And, there were these big opportunities for trade, but instead of concentrating on trade, the West concentrated on violent conquest, dispossession, coercion. And so, the Native peoples in the Americas were made much worse off when they could have been made better off. I can give you the exact quotes from Smith, but that’s his argument, very clearly made in one part of the Wealth of Nations.
Russ Roberts: Well, he has some very powerful statements in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about the dignity of so-called–he sometimes calls them savages, I think you point out in your book, but he respected them deeply. He simply meant by that, that they did not have the accoutrements of civilization. He honored them in very eloquent ways.
Russ Roberts: Before going to a different topic, I just want to read a brief quote here about Kant–the philosopher, Immanuel Kant–because it’s just a special joke here that I really enjoyed. You write,
Kant in his writings counterbalanced what it means to be human against violations of dignity: [Russ Roberts: Here’s the Kant quote:]
As a person (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in itself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world. [–Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals. Parentheses original to Easterly]
End of the Kant quote.
And you add:
Kant’s usually tortured syntax was not going to give him much of a future in the refrigerator magnet industry.
Close quote. I just love that. Thank you for writing that.
You can add, if you–say anything you want, or we can just move on.
William Easterly: No, I’m just laughing at my own joke.
Russ Roberts: It’s lovely.
29:42
Russ Roberts: I want to ask you about an important part of the liberal movement from both economists, philosophers, and others–and you talk about it many times in the book–which is freedom as an end in and of itself. And, you mentioned earlier that–I think it was Mill or others used the moral argument against slavery, the moral argument against coercion. He didn’t debate whether slavery made people materially better off. He simply saw their slavery or their coercion in the case of, say, communism–later–as a bad.
And, I have noted in my lifetime that that argument is rarely, if ever, made.
If you go back and you watch interviews, say, with Margaret Thatcher, she will often invoke freedom as an end in and of itself. And it seems so archaic, because no modern politician in the United States–and I doubt in Britain, either–will make that argument. It’s considered–I don’t know what the word is–it’s just not persuasive to most people. They no longer value freedom in and of itself. They care about outcomes. We’ve become much more utilitarian, I would argue, over the last 50 years. Do you agree with me? And, what are your thoughts on that?
William Easterly: Yeah, I agree with you. I’m not sure if it’s exactly over the last 50 years–
Russ Roberts: Yeah, I made that up–
William Easterly: It was already shifting in the late 19th century with Alfred Marshall and the founders of the American Economic Association in the United States. They were already saying: ‘We don’t want moral debates. We just want scientific analysis of what raises GDP.’
I think all of us modern economists, are in some degree, heirs to that emphasis. So, obviously, we can’t just dispute that. That is an important debate.
But, what they lost and the penalties for losing this in the late 19th century were big because they were going to implicitly justify a lot of bad things like eugenics with the original founders of the American Economic Association, as Thomas Leonard has so eloquently shown. So, really, I think it goes back to that.
And, I think what’s maybe notable and a little discouraging for me is, you know, one generation after another of liberal economists have tried to make this point–that freedom should be an end in itself. Going all the way back to Adam Smith, but in more modern times, it was P.T. Bauer, the great development economist, saying, ‘Freedom should be an end in itself.’ Milton Friedman saying, ‘Freedom should be an end in itself.’ Amartya Sen coming along writing a book, Development as Freedom.
And all of these efforts, at least in the intellectual marketplace, unfortunately failed. They failed to get people to take freedom as a goal in itself, or even to recognize what they were saying. Even to acknowledge what they were saying. When you read reviews of Bauer and Friedman’s books, the reviewers never say, ‘Well, congrats to these guys for at least recognizing freedom should be an end in itself.’ They never say that. They always are just disputing whether freedom raises GDP or not. That’s always a debate.
And I think even kind of modern classical liberals themselves realizing maybe that this intellectual debate is really hard to win, the liberals, modern classical liberals themselves often emphasize also the fact of liberty on material GDP, and primarily that.
And, it’s like liberals are sort of giving away one of their big arguments for liberal policies–like, letting markets and free trade work–is that that is a way to satisfy another big human need, another big human need for agency and freedom, and the dignity that that confers. I think we liberals sort of throw away that argument that should be working for us. But apparently, it’s not working well enough that we bother investing our time in that. [More to come, 34:10]
