With his books The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden, William Easterly significantly changed the terms of the debate over the role of government and foreign aid in addressing poverty and underdevelopment. It is important to stress, however, that Easterly's work is not just a critique of efforts at development planning due to perverse incentives, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and errors in information. Rather, his writings contain a deep understanding of the role of the entrepreneurial market process in lifting individuals out of poverty and producing a social order of freedom, dignity, peace, and prosperity. Development follows from a society of free and responsible individuals who participate in a market economy based on profit and loss; who participate in a political regime governed by principle, not privilege; and who live in a society that exhibits neither discrimination nor dominion. Easterly is one of the clearest voices in economics today for how the free enterprise system is a catalyst for human betterment.
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