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Podcast: EconTalk
Episode:

Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)
Category: Education
Duration: 01:04:02
Publish Date: 2025-12-08 11:30:00
Description:

 Can the promise of economic progress ever justify conquest, coercion, and control over other people’s lives? Economist William Easterly joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to argue no--and to rethink what "development" really means in theory, in history, and in our politics today. Drawing on his new book, Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest, Easterly explores how colonial powers and later regimes like the Soviet Union claimed to increase people's material well-being while stripping them of freedom, dignity, and any say in their own fate. Russ and Easterly dig into the idea of agency--the ability of people to choose for themselves--through the lens of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Frederick Douglass, and modern debates over foreign aid, autocrats, and technocratic "solutions" imposed from afar.
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