The failed ideologies of the last century have come to an end. But a new one

has risen to take their place. It is the ideology of Development—and it

promises a solution to all the world’s ills. But like Communism, Fascism,

and the others before it, Developmentalism is a dangerous and deadly

failure. | By William Easterly

A dark ideological specter is haunt-ing the world. It is almost as deadlyas the tired ideologies of the last cen-tury—communism, fascism, and

socialism—that failed so miserably. It feeds some ofthe most dangerous trends of our time, includingreligious fundamentalism. It is the half-century-oldideology of Developmentalism. And it is thriving.

Like all ideologies, Development promises acomprehensive final answer to all of society’s problems,from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despoticrulers. It shares the common ideological characteristicof suggesting there is only one correct answer, and ittolerates little dissent. It deduces this unique answer foreveryone from a general theory that purports to applyto everyone, everywhere. There’s no need to involvelocal actors who reap its costs and benefits. Develop-ment even has its own intelligentsia, made up ofexperts at the International Monetary Fund (imf),World Bank, and United Nations.

The power of Developmentalism is dishearten-ing, because the failure of all the previous ideologiesmight have laid the groundwork for the opposite ofideology—the freedom of individuals and societiesto choose their destinies. Yet, since the fall of commu-nism, the West has managed to snatch defeat fromthe jaws of victory, and with disastrous results.

Development ideology is sparking a dangerouscounterreaction. The “one correct answer” came tomean “free markets,” and, for the poor world, it wasdefined as doing whatever the imf and the WorldBank tell you to do. But the reaction in Africa,Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, andRussia has been to fight against free markets. So, oneof the best economic ideas of our time, the geniusof free markets, was presented in one of the worstpossible ways, with unelected outsiders imposingrigid doctrines on the xenophobic unwilling.

The backlash has been so severe that other failedideologies are gaining new adherents throughoutthese regions. In Nicaragua, for instance, imf andWorld Bank structural adjustments failed so con-spicuously that the pitiful Sandinista regime of the1980s now looks good by comparison. Its leader,Daniel Ortega, is back in power. The imf’s actionsduring the Argentine financial crisis of 2001 nowreverberate a half decade later with Hugo Chávez,Venezuela’s illiberal leader, being welcomed with openarms in Buenos Aires. The heavy-handed directives ofthe World Bank and imf in Bolivia provided the soilfrom which that country’s neosocialist president, EvoMorales, sprung. The disappointing payoff followingeight structural adjustment loans to Zimbabwe and$8 billion in foreign aid during the 1980s and 1990shelped Robert Mugabe launch a vicious counter-attack on democracy. The imf-World Bank-JeffreySachs application of “shock therapy” to the former

William Easterly is professor of economics at New York

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DevelopmentThe Ideology of

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[ The Ideology of Development ]

growth, and the global Millennium DevelopmentGoals, over the aspirations of individuals. Bureaucratswho write poverty-reduction frameworks outrankindividuals who actually reduce poverty by, say,starting a business. Just as Marxists favored worldrevolution and socialist internationalism, Develop-ment stresses world goals over the autonomy ofsocieties to choose their own path. It favors doctrinaireabstractions such as “market-friendly policies,” “goodinvestment climate,” and “pro-poor globalization”over the freedom of individuals.

Development also shares another Marxist trait:It aspires to be scientific. Finding the one correctsolution to poverty is seen as a scientific problem tobe solved by the experts. They are always sure theyknow the answer, vehemently reject disagreement,and then later change their answers. In psychiatry,this is known as Borderline Personality Disorder. Forthe Development Experts, it’s a way of life. Theanswer at first was aid-financed investment andindustrialization in poor countries, then it wasmarket-oriented government policy reform, then itwas fixing institutional problems such as corruption,then it was globalization, then it was the PovertyReduction Strategy to achieve the MillenniumDevelopment Goals.

One reason the answers keep changing isbecause, in reality, high-growth countries follow abewildering variety of paths to development, and

the countries with high growth ratesare constantly changing from decadeto decade. Who could be moredifferent than successful developerssuch as China and Chile, Botswanaand Singapore, Taiwan and Turkey,or Hong Kong and Vietnam? Whatabout the many countries who tried

to emulate these rising stars and failed? What aboutthe former stars who have fallen on hard times,like the Ivory Coast, which was one of the fastestdevelopers of the 1960s and 1970s, only to becomemired in a civil war? What about Mexico, which sawrapid growth until 1980 and has had slow growthever since, despite embracing the experts’ reforms?

The experts in Developmentalism’s Politburodon’t bother themselves with such questions. All theprevious answers were right; they were just missingone more “necessary condition” that the experts haveonly just now added to the list. Like all ideologies,Development is at the same time too rigid to predictwhat will work in the messy real world and yetflexible enough to forever escape falsification by

Soviet Union has created a lasting nostalgia forcommunism. In the Middle East, $154 billion inforeign aid between 1980 and 2001, 45 structuraladjustment loans, and “expert” advice producedzero per capita gdp growth that helped create abreeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism.

This blowback against “globalization from above”has spread to every corner of the Earth. It nowthreatens to kill sensible, moderate steps toward thefreer movement of goods, ideas, capital, and people.

D E V E L O P M E N T ’ S P O L I T B U R O

The ideology of Development is not only abouthaving experts design your free market for you; itis about having the experts design a comprehensive,technical plan to solve all the problems of the poor.These experts see poverty as a purely technologicalproblem, to be solved by engineering and the naturalsciences, ignoring messy social sciences such aseconomics, politics, and sociology.

Sachs, Columbia University’s celebrity economist,is one of its main proprietors. He is now recyclinghis theories of overnight shock therapy, which failedso miserably in Russia, into promises of overnightglobal poverty reduction. “Africa’s problems,” hehas said, “are … solvable with practical and proventechnologies.” His own plan features hundreds ofexpert interventions to solve every last problem of the

poor—from green manure, breast-feeding education,and bicycles to solar-energy systems, school uniformsfor aids orphans, and windmills. Not to mentionsuch critical interventions as “counseling and infor-mation services for men to address their reproductivehealth needs.” All this will be done, Sachs says, by “aunited and effective United Nations country team,which coordinates in one place the work of the U.N.specialized agencies, the imf, and the World Bank.”

So the admirable concern of rich countries for thetragedies of world poverty is thus channeled intofattening the international aid bureaucracy, the self-appointed priesthood of Development. Like otherideologies, this thinking favors collective goals suchas national poverty reduction, national economic

Under Developmentalism, an end to starvation,

tyranny, and war are thrown in like a free toaster.

real-world events. The high church of Development,the World Bank, has guaranteed it can never bewrong by making statements such as, “differentpolicies can yield the same result, and the samepolicy can yield different results, depending oncountry institutional contexts and underlyinggrowth strategies.” Of course, you still need expertsto figure out the contexts and strategies.

R E S I S TA N C E I S F U T I L E

Perhaps more hypocritical yet is Development’s simpletheory of historical inevitability. Poor societies are notjust poor, the experts tell us, they are “developing”until they reach the final stage of history, or “devel-opment,” in which poverty will soon end. Under thishistoriography, an end to starvation, tyranny, and warare thrown in like a free toaster on an infomercial.The experts judge all societies on a straight line, percapita income, with the superior countries showingthe inferior countries the image of their own future.And the experts heap scorn on those who resist theinevitabilities on the path to development.

One of today’s leading Developmentalists, NewYork Times columnist Thomas Friedman, can hardly

conceal his mockery of those who resist the marchof history, or “the flattening of the world.” “Whenyou are Mexico,” Friedman has written, “and yourclaim to fame is that you are a low-wage manu-facturing country, and some of your people areimporting statuettes of your own patron saint fromChina, because China can make them and shipthem all the way across the Pacific more cheaplythan you can produce them … you have got a prob-lem. [T]he only way for Mexico to thrive is with astrategy of reform … the more Mexico just sitsthere, the more it is going to get run over.” Friedmanseems blissfully unaware that poor Mexico, so farfrom God yet so close to American pundits, hasalready tried much harder than China to implementthe experts’ “strategy of reform.”

The self-confidence of Developmentalists likeFriedman is so strong that they impose themselveseven on those who accept their strategies. This year,for instance, Ghana celebrated its 50th anniversary asthe first black African nation to gain independence.Official international aid donors to Ghana told itsallegedly independent government, in the words of theWorld Bank: “We Partners are here giving you ourpledge to give our best to make lives easier for you in

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running your country.” Among the things they will doto make your life easier is to run your country for you.

Unfortunately, Development ideology has adismal record of helping any country actuallydevelop. The regions where the ideology has beenmost influential, Latin America and Africa, havedone the worst. Luckless Latins and Africans are leftchasing yesterday’s formulas for success whilethose who ignored the Developmentalists foundhomegrown paths to success. The nations thathave been the most successful in the past 40 yearsdid so in such a variety of different ways that itwould be hard to argue that they discovered the“correct answer” from development ideology. In fact,they often conspicuously violated whatever it wasthe experts said at the time. The East Asian tigers,for instance, chose outward orientation on theirown in the 1960s, when the experts’ conventionalwisdom was industrialization for the home market.The rapid growth of China over the past quartercentury came when it was hardly a poster child foreither the 1980s Washington Consensus or the1990s institutionalism of democracy and crackingdown on corruption.

What explains the appeal of development ideolo-gy despite its dismal track record? Ideologies usuallyarise in response to tragic situations in whichpeople are hungry for clear and comprehensivesolutions. The inequality of the Industrial Revolu-tion bred Marxism, and the backwardness of Russiaits Leninist offshoot. Germany’s defeat and demor-alization in World War i birthed Nazism. Economichardship accompanied by threats to identity ledto both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism.Similarly, development ideology appeals to thosewho want a definitive, complete answer to thetragedy of world poverty and inequality. It answersthe question, “What is to be done?” to borrow thetitle of Lenin’s 1902 tract. It stresses collective socialoutcomes that must be remedied by collective,top-down action by the intelligentsia, the revolu-tionary vanguard, the development expert. As Sachsexplains, “I have … gradually come to understandthrough my scientific research and on the groundadvisory work the awesome power in our genera-tion’s hands to end the massive suffering of theextreme poor … although introductory economicstextbooks preach individualism and decentralized

markets, our safety and prosperity depend at leastas much on collective decisions.”

F R E E I N G T H E P O O R

Few realize that Americans in 1776 had the sameincome level as the average African today. Yet, likeall the present-day developed nations, the UnitedStates was lucky enough to escape poverty beforethere were Developmentalists. In the words of formerimf First Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger,development in the rich nations “just happened.”George Washington did not have to deal with aidpartners, getting structurally adjusted by them, orpreparing poverty-reduction strategy papers for them.Abraham Lincoln did not celebrate a government ofthe donors, by the donors, and for the donors. Today’sdeveloped nations were free to experiment with theirown pragmatic paths toward more governmentaccountability and freer markets. Individualismand decentralized markets were good enough to giverise to penicillin, air conditioning, high-yield corn,and the automobile—not to mention better livingstandards, lower mortality, and the iPod.

The opposite of ideology is freedom, the abilityof societies to be unchained from foreign control. Theonly “answer” to poverty reduction is freedom frombeing told the answer. Free societies and individualsare not guaranteed to succeed. They will make badchoices. But at least they bear the cost of thosemistakes, and learn from them. That stands in stark

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contrast to accountability-free Developmentalism.This process of learning from mistakes is whatproduced the repositories of common sense thatmake up mainstream economics. The opposite ofDevelopment ideology is not anything goes, but thepragmatic use of time-tested economic ideas—thebenefits of specialization, comparative advantage,gains from trade, market-clearing prices, trade-offs,budget constraints—by individuals, firms, govern-ments, and societies as they find their own success.

History proves just how much good can comefrom individuals who both bear the costs and reapthe benefits of their own choices when they are freeto make them. That includes local politicians,activists, and businesspeople who are groping theirway toward greater freedom, contrary to the Devel-opmentalists who oxymoronically impose freedomof choice on other people. Those who best under-stood the lessons of the 20th century were not theideologues asking, “What is to be done?” Theywere those asking, “How can people be more freeto find their own solutions?”

The ideology of Development should be packedup in crates and sent off to the Museum of DeadIdeologies, just down the hall from Communism,Socialism, and Fascism. It’s time to recognize thatthe attempt to impose a rigid development ideologyon the world’s poor has failed miserably. Fortunately,many poor societies are forging their own pathtoward greater freedom and prosperity anyway.That is how true revolutions happen.

[ Want to Know More? ]

William Easterly’s previous works on global development and poverty reduction include The White Man’sBurden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York:Penguin Press, 2006). He also challenged the wishful thinking of economists, politicians, and rock starsin “The Utopian Nightmare” (Foreign Policy, September/October 2005).

Jeffrey Sachs offers a prescription for solving poverty on a global scale in The End of Poverty:Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). For insight into the WorldBank’s philosophy and operations, see Dani Rodrik’s “Goodbye Washington Consensus, HelloWashington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank’s Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learningfrom a Decade of Reform” (Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006).

The ideologies of the last century are discussed in Isaiah Berlin’s Political Ideas in the Romantic Age:Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

»For links to relevant Web sites, access to the FP Archive, and a comprehensive index of relatedForeign Policy articles, go to www.ForeignPolicy.com.