E233 - Violent Saviors: A Conversation With Bill Easterly

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Peter Boettke talks with Bill Easterly about his new book, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest. Drawing on figures such as Adam Smith, P.T. Bauer, and Amartya Sen, Easterly argues that material progress alone cannot justify the denial of human dignity and consent. The conversation explores the idea of the “benevolent autocrat” and examines how both colonialism and modern development policy have too often treated people as objects of improvement rather than agents of their own lives. Along the way, Boettke and Easterly discuss state capacity, slavery, coloni...