The importance of rule of law and human rights for international development is well established. Hernando DeSoto (The Other Path, 1989) argued for rule of law and especially property rights in the 1980s. Peter Uvin made this point in his Human Rights and Development (2004). More recently, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in Why Nations Fail (2013), introduced the idea of inclusive institutions, arguing that the institutions that enforce the rule of law and protect individual rights are preconditions for broader social development in health, education, and economic arenas of life. How is it then that issues of rights, freedom, justice, democracy, and rule of law seem to be low priority in development work? As pointed out by both books reviewed here, these topics are all but missing in the well-known Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Instead, the MDGs focus on the material and tangible. In this they are consistent with the large share of development practice.
The main thesis of both The Locust Effect and The Tyranny of Experts is that this situation has to change, at least if we are serious about wanting the lives of the world's poor to improve. While both books concur on this basic point, their emphases differ considerably. Haugen's and Boutros' goal is to help the world's poor get out from under the injustices and violence they suffer daily, and they offer helpful ideas of how that might happen on both individual and structural levels. Easterly focuses more on economic oppression and the failure of poor nations to establish free market economies. Leaning heavily on Adam Smith's “invisible hand” and Friedrich Von Hayek's “spontaneous order,” he preaches how free, rights-respecting societies are necessary for economic vitality. For all Easterly's exhortation, however, one looks in vain for recommendations on what to do. The implication seems to be that if we simply get out of each other's way, and especially stop trying to help each other, then a good society, characterized by a vibrant economy, will arise spontaneously.
For Haugen and Boutros, both lawyers with much experience in justice systems and justice work, their sense of mission seems to come from the heart. They cry with the poor who suffer violence daily and are angry with those who perpetrate it. Working for the International Justice Mission (IJM) and the U.S. Justice Department, respectively, they have seen what the absence of the rule of law means for the poor—their land is stolen, their children are raped, their wages go unpaid, and whole families are enslaved. And there is no recourse, because the poor live outside the legal system. Sometimes protective laws do not exist. Other times they do, but the laws are not enforced. As Haugen and Boutros see it, police and whole legal systems are among the enemies of the poor instead of allies. Should the poor make some gains, powerful people, often the police themselves, swoop in to gobble them up like a plague of locusts, leaving only ruin and despair behind. The enemies of the poor are thus all those who exploit, abuse, steal, and traffic. They do this because they are corrupt, they have power, their interests are served, and the law does not stop them. For development to occur, the predations of the powerful must be checked. For the poor to flourish in all arenas of their lives, good laws and their enforcement are the sine qua non.
Easterly's heart no doubt also comes into play, but his spleen is also on display as he goes after the World Bank, his former employer with which he grows increasingly disenchanted. He argues that World Bank economists and too many other development experts make decisions and enact programs purportedly to improve economic well-being, but they take no account of the voices and views of the poor themselves. The result is technocratic solutions that are implemented as easily by self-serving autocrats as by leaders in a democratic society. This tragic pattern was established at the founding of the World Bank when its charter explicitly forbade engagement with political affairs. The World Bank thus developed technocratic solutions to improve tangible aspects of well-being (e.g. health and income), while at the same time turning a blind eye to oppressive governments destined to keep their people in poverty. If aid programs target the tangible and ignore intangibles such as freedom and individual rights, those programs will ultimately fail.
In the most fascinating parts of both books, the authors explain why rule of law and human rights are so ignored. For Haugen and Boutros it starts with legal systems set up by colonial administrations that were designed to protect the colonizers, not the poor. When independence came, the new elites moved into the vacated power positions and happily accepted the systems that now protected them. Decades later, elites still benefit from these systems. Nor do elites need extensive general public safety measures, because they can buy their own private security. So it is that elites feel little need to change. What is worse, they do not even want to change.
The story Easterly tells is even darker; it involves self-serving paternalism, blatant disrespect, open racism, and little more than lip-service to democracy and political freedom. Some of the players in this drama, like those rapacious autocrats, have few qualms about denying the poor their rights. But in Easterly's telling, Western governments and big development agencies such as the World Bank join in the oppression. Easterly identifies three principles, reinforced over decades, that keep aid agencies from paying attention to individual rights. First, because development solutions are technical, there is no need for local input or any consideration of a nation's particular history. Second, the overriding emphasis on a nation's economic growth as the main objective makes it easy to strip the nation of its humanity and treat it as an object. And third, because technocrats favor planned designs over the uncertainty and spontaneity of free individual choice, they address problems as experts and treat people as targets instead of as agents with views, ideas, and desires. Rule of law and individual rights are ignored and the oppression continues.
Those who know the work of IJM will have no trouble identifying the Christian underpinnings and intent of The Locust Effect, even though the book contains no explicitly faith-oriented argument. The holistic view of human beings, the recognition of human sinfulness, the irrepressible hopefulness, and the call on everyone never to give up in attending to the well-being of every human being, especially the most vulnerable, are themes that resonate harmonically with Christian faith. Likewise, those who know mainstream economics will have no trouble recognizing in The Tyranny of Experts a worldview in which human beings are self-interested individualists who respond to incentives in the service of their own well-being. Drawing on their worldviews, Haugen and Boutros speak to their readers' hearts and call them to grow in their abilities to impact the world constructively, while Easterly calls upon us to set up systems in which self-interest can be channeled to positive ends and thus spontaneously bring us to a better world.