There was another favourable review of Bill Easterly’s [amazon_link id=”0465031250″ target=”_blank” ]The Tyranny of Experts [/amazon_link]in The Observer yesterday – it doesn’t seem to be online, but here is the FT’s from a few weeks ago.

[amazon_image id=”0465031250″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor[/amazon_image]

I will read it soon. Meanwhile, it reminded me of a passage in Jeremy Adelman’s fabulous biography of Albert Hirschman, [amazon_link id=”0691163499″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link]. Hirschman was working in Colombia in the early 1950s on a World Bank project, one of its first big country ‘surveys’, led by Lauchlin Currie.  Currie was allowed to turn a survey into a general development ‘master plan’, “Laying the tracks for a problem regarding the place of local knowledge in the business of economic missionizing.” Adelman writes that the plan was, “Coded in the scientific rhetoric of economic missionaries.” Hirschman clashed with Currie in terms of both personalities and ideas. The hallmark of Hirschman’s approach to economic development was exactly the importance of the specifics and local knowledge.

[amazon_image id=”0691163499″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman[/amazon_image]

I don’t know whether Easterly’s book cites Hirschman, or [amazon_link id=”0691117829″ target=”_blank” ]Peter Bauer[/amazon_link], who had somewhat similar views and insisted on the importance of historical specificities, but it sounds like their approaches are in sympathy.