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Violent Saviors

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What to expect

A celebrated economist argues that economic development is not really development unless everyone has the right to consent to their own progress

For centuries, the developed Western world has exploited the less-developed “Rest” in the name of progress, conquering the Americas, driving the Atlantic slave trade, and colonizing Africa and Asia. Throughout, the West has justified this global conquest by the alleged material gains it brought to the conquered. But the colonial experiment unintentionally revealed how much of a demand there was for self-determination, and not just for relief from poverty. 
  
In Violent Saviors, renowned economist William Easterly examines how the demand for agency has always been at the heart of debates on development. Spanning nearly four centuries of global history, Easterly argues that commerce, rather than conquest, could meet the need for equal rights as well as the need for prosperity. Looking to the liberal economic ideas of thinkers like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Amartya Sen, Easterly shows how the surge in global trade has given agency to billions of people for the first time. 
  
Narrating the long debate between conquest and commerce, Easterly offers a new and urgent perspective on global economics: the demands for agency, dignity, and respect must be at the center of the global fight against poverty. 

Critics Review

“Easterly writes about freedom, something that economists too often forget in their pursuit of growth and living standards. That life is about more than money and that there can be no price on the loss of freedom is a lesson that has taken the world three hundred years to learn. Adam Smith got it right, unlike most of the economists who followed him. Easterly’s deep scholarship brings the story to life, celebrating the few who saw clearly, some familiar, many not. An innovative and exhilarating read.”—Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
“Easterly has done it again, sharply revising what we thought we knew, but didn’t. He shows us the startling unity among tyrannies we imagined were distinct. A triumph of liberal thought.”—Deirdre McCloskey, Cato Institute
“It is a central tenet of economics that markets produce more efficient outcomes than planning because markets aggregate information from innumerable voluntary exchanges, while planning is based on decision making by a small group of experts who cannot help but bring along their normative values. This powerful idea has a drawback, however; it leaves little role for experts, and experts have strong incentives to embrace big roles for experts. The tension between voluntary consent and expert judgement has produced levels of prosperity that were unimaginable at the founding of the discipline of economics 250 years ago, but has also produced human tragedies at vast scale. If you want to understand how this tension developed, and why it gave rise to both prosperity and tragedy, you must read Violent Saviors.”—Stephen Haber, Stanford University
“Violent Saviors is Bill Easterly’s masterpiece. It brilliantly weaves together the self-serving and arrogant histories of the conquests, enslavements, and destructive ‘assistance’ the West has imposed on the Rest, showing the common patronizing thread that connects them and tracing all these hideous histories to the philosophies that justified them, which Easterly masterfully dissects. But amidst the horrors and ugliness, there is hope: some thinkers and actors, from Adam Smith to Easterly himself, insistently teach us to respect individual dignity and promote freedom as the cornerstone of all human flourishing. And Easterly reminds us that the long arc of history is on their side.”—Charles Calomiris, Columbia Business School
Author William Easterly
Narrator Fred Sanders
Duration 11 hours and 44 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781668652749
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Development economics and emerging economies, Development studies, Economic history, General and world history, Globalization, Social classes
Availability US

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