The Public Square

The public intellectual has the rewarding, or daunting (if you're the glass half empty type), task of analyzing, redacting, criticizing, and offering remedies to society. While an academic career helps to bolster the credibility of a public intellectual, more work is needed to secure their ability to influence. Influence being what a public intellectual aims to exert. Experience and the ability to communicate to the public at large is what elevates one to the coveted goal of being a recognized public intellectual. The public intellectual must cultivate an aura of being a realist while appearing to be in touch with public sentiments in order to be deemed authentic and wise.

William Easterly has emerged as a premiere example of a public intellectual, easily meeting all of the qualifications necessary to be considered a public intellectual. William Easterly was trained as an academic in economics, emerging from pure academia as one of the foremost experts on developing countries and their market economies, as well as the use and appropriation of foreign aid. William Easterly received his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT and is currently a Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC.

Easterly has expanded his intellectual role far beyond that of an academic or research institution. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank implementing theoretical concepts in a real world. Easterly misses few opportunities to give to society by his involvement in many good causes, such as the board of the anti-malaria philanthropy, Nets for Life. He is prolific, the author of Reinventing Foreign Aid, The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, three other co-edited books, and 59 articles in refereed economics journals. Easterly's writings have been discussed in media outlets like the Lehrer Newshour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Easterly's reputation in world development stems from his promoting new modes of assistance to developing countries that the numerous Aid Agencies are too bureaucratic to implement. In the ways in which Easterly has expanded thinking about aid, its effectiveness and its best means of implementation, he is showing the world how academics can bring knowledge into the realm of utility, basically "know how". Easterly represents the key combination of academics and experience that is able to inform the world population. It is crucial to put an emphasis on the experience component when claiming the title of public intellectual. Stephen Mack in hi blog The New Democratic Review states in an August 2007 post “The ‘Decline’ of Public Intellectuals?” in regards to the public official’s role,

That is, our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is—and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.

Easterly is the doer Stephen Mack refers to. Easterly has even furthered defined the role of the public intellectual to be a searcher. More precisely in his book Reinventing Foreign Aid he proposes what the searcher must do to further the progress being made in the developing world:

It (poverty) is ended by ‘‘searchers,’’ both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work.

Easterly makes it clear that a searcher holds himself or herself accountable; he further defines the searcher's position:

A searcher admits she does not know the answers in advance; she believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A searcher only hopes to find answers to individual problems of the world’s poor by trial-and-error experimentation.

Besides writing books, opinion editorials, and academic articles, Easterly has testified in US Senate hearings regarding the use of US aid assistance and World Aid Agencies. He sometimes comes off as their biggest critic. While many of Easterly’s development procedures and uses for Aid have yet to be fully enacted, the discourse he has created on the topic has brought much needed attention to the failure of foreign aid and Aid Agencies and the search for better ways to bring aid to communities who need it.

Easterly recently served on the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland. Easterly openly opposed Bill Gates’ “Kinder Capitalism” incentives. Easterly aimed not to multiply aid support, or centrally plan further economic aid programs, but to hold the governments and agencies dealing with aid accountable for their actions, and where and what the aid was being used for. Easterly is critical of an environment that is “top-down” oriented, where agencies are unable to coordinate because they are so bureaucratic, and the agencies fail to examine the situation on the ground. Planning just doesn’t work. Easterly as a public intellectual uses his real world experience of working with the World Bank (one of the bureaucratic agencies he refers to), researching on the ground in Africa, and focusing his academic studies on the statistics coming out of the developing world from the past 50 years to develop a productive conversation with the developed world and their efforts to help the developing world. In an important side note it is crucial to make clear that Easterly finds the use of “we” referring to the westernized world, extremely problematic within the field.

Easterly’s approach of accountability, “bottom-up” feedback, and real world needs is about modernizing the developing world but by no means westernizing the developing world which he thinks is key part of the problem with the Western World’s aid programs. Easterly in his most recent book quotes F. A. Hayek, a well-known economist in the 1940’s, in describing individuals and progress:

The interaction of individuals, possessing different knowledge and different views, is what constitutes the life of thought. The growth of reason is a social process based on the existence of such differences. It is of essence that its results cannot be predicted, that we cannot know which views will assist this growth and which will not —in short, that this growth cannot be governed by any views which we now possess without at the same time limiting it. To ‘‘plan’’ or ‘‘organize’’ the growth of mind, or for that matter, progress in general, is a contradiction in terms.

Easterly is a strong promoter in his work of analyzing a situation, and trying multiple problem solving tactics to discover which solution is the most effective. He makes it clear, as Hayek says, that you cannot know prior to trying something out what will be most effective. His opinions as to the accountability of the use of aid has indeed had some impact on the US government, although Easterly would like it to be more profound. In 2004, the US Congress passed a law for the Us Agency for International Development to collect data to test socioeconomic benefits of microlending in regards to the World Bank’s microcredit programs. The World Bank can no longer put microcredit forward as the “best practice.” The problem is that microlenders tend to help richer clients, and it’s not always clear if the real world fits the ideal of commercially viable microlending. Easterly fit the key role of a public intellectual to criticize and affect policymaking.

Easterly as a public intellectual plays the role of a “myth buster”. Easterly brings reason to the “run amok enthusiasm” surrounding foreign aid. In a July 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times, Easterly sheds light on the misrepresentations of the African continent. In Easterly’s article “What Bono Doesn’t Say”, he busts the myth that Africa isn’t quite the desolate place we Americans have been led to believe due to the negative images put forth by the media. Easterly is concerned that aid efforts like the Gap Red Campaign, and the Vanity Fair Africa issue, promote only a specific type of Africa,

The problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help. The reality is that many more Africans need latrines than need Western peacekeepers — but that doesn't play so well on TV.

Easterly is putting forth detailed examinations and ideas that are “worth talking about ”. The idea that a class of experts is the best mode to operate has been detrimental to foreign aid. People must remain responsive but that is only possible when the public intellectual reaches out and engages the citizens with issues that are in need of repair with realistic approaches to do so. The ivory tower does not create an environment to engage non ivory tower residents. Easterly criticizes Paul Wolfowitz because of his inability to escape that vary tower in his political role as the president of the World Bank. In an April 2007 Easterly article for The Washington Post “Does He Hear the World's Poor? Don't Bank on It”, Easterly sites academic hubris as the source of Wolfowitz’s inability to perform as the Bank’s president. Easterly said,

The root cause of his debacle at the bank was pretty much the same as the reason for the fiasco in Iraq: intellectual hubris at the top that disdained the messy realities at the bottom.

The public intellectual must work hard to overcome any academic superiority complex to be able to find faults in not just their peer’s studies, but also their own such studies. Easterly’s emphasis on avoiding hubris and stressing independent evaluation is not just applicable to his work in economics and foreign aid, but to society on a whole. In Reinventing Foreign Aid, he puts forth a simple code:

Focusing on specific feasible tasks and holding the aid actors responsible for whether they achieve them is a no-brainer, except for the absence of these simple principles in today’s foreign aid system.

Easterly has been and continues to be an important voice in the forum of economic development. Easterly’s eagerness to create a more successful process in which foreign aid is administered is reason enough to argue the authenticity of his genuine concern to make a difference. Easterly also makes the important distinction in his work to help to modernize but not to westernize the developing world. He remains the realist that keeps the public intellectual a viable resource and key component to change and progress in the developing world.