The Tyranny of Experts
non-fiction work by William Easterly
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor is a 2014 book by the development economist William Easterly. It traces the history of the fight against global poverty, and examines the structural incentives of development. Easterly contends that poverty reduction has been used as a tactic to take away the rights of the poor and give power to the state and corporations. He suggests poverty reduction is better served by greater respect for individual freedom than a reliance on technocracy.
Themes
The book argues that there are no simple answers for promoting economic development and that the best hope is to support economic, political, and personal freedom worldwide. The book is similar to Easterly's earlier books on economic development, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. The book argues that in order for development to succeed, the principles of development should be correct first and must be built bottom up. Consequently, it does not present practical solutions to modern economical development issues, but rather argues for debates to take place for the best way forward in development economics. This has led many reviewers to criticize it for not presenting practical solutions.
Reception
Self-promotion
Shortly after the release of the book, Easterly wrote an article for Foreign Policy summarizing the key arguments of the book.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17148411. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Tyranny of Experts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.