Bill Easterly skewers the World Bank’s new Growth Report in today’s Financial Times:

After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11- member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

…[T]his report represents the final collapse of the “development expert” paradigm that has governed the west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy.

The solution, writes Easterly, is to rely more on individuals and their decisions. As development experts fall, he raises up social and economic entrepreneurs. His philosophy in brief:

Systems that give more liberty to individuals – featuring both more economic and political freedoms – are associated with much less poverty.

Of course he is right to emphasize individual freedoms and entrepreneurs. But does this imply the sun has set on experts?

In fact the Growth Report highlights a great many lessons learned and promulgated by experts, lessons that have been crucial to growth and poverty reduction. How to smooth the economic cycle. What not to do in an economic crisis. How to respond to health emergencies. The roots of climate change.

Ironically, the emphasis on individual liberty as a means to economic growth is itself the pet theory of elitist experts–and is no less correct because of it.

More ironically still, Bill writes this piece on the very day he hosts a conference of the very experts he derides–a meeting with no less a title than “What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small“.

It’s a fascinating conference, peopled by some of the top development economists in the world. But so far it is also the epitome of academic navel gazing. I did not have time to give Bill grief today, but there is tomorrow.

Update: Conference papers are here for those interested.

Update II: Bill points me to a comment on his article by Paul Seabright and Bill’s response. Bill’s main point:

There is a big difference between saying “a small group of experts cannot cause growth in a whole economy” and saying “all experts are useless.”

He was saying the former, not the latter. Sounds sensible to me, especially because it implies I still get to play in the game.