Um, is this tendency one that you think, um, has, uh, direct connections to the way that development institutions, development professionals, um, sort of consider their own power or their own authority and the roles that they've taken on?

Well, um, first of all, let me say I, I don't at all think of today's development people as being in the same camp as conquerors and, and slave owners.

[chuckles] That's, that's not at all what I'm trying to say.

In fact, if anything, the opposite.

I'm sort of celebrating the progress that made development today possible, that there was implicitly in, in the, in the background this acceptance of sort of non-nonviolence, non-coercion as part of the process of development.

And you know, we can think of development today as really the-- featuring a little bit weaker version of both sides, that there are those who stress a lot the, the, the freedom and consent and agency aspect, and there are those who are, who are gonna stress, uh, material income and overlook, you know, authoritarian ways to achieve material income.

So, you know, I think the legacy-- the lesson of the extreme cases is, wow, we've come a long way since that, and we're not, we're not as bad as that.

[laughs]

What's your book about?

Jonah, let me start with where the book came from.

Uh, I've been observing as a development economist for many years that there's this concept of benevolent autocrats, benevolent dictators, in which if a dictator happens to have a lot of economic growth on his watch, he's presumed to be benevolent.

So somebody like, uh, Meles Zenawi, the dictator of Ethiopia from the '90s through 2012, uh, did have high economic growth in Ethiopia and was presumed to be a benevolent guy, and got, got praise from the likes of Bill Gates and Susan Rice.

And yet, uh, Bill, uh, Meles Zenawi was also at the same time putting political protestor, protesters in jail, shooting them down in the streets, marching farmers away from their villages at gunpoint to government-run villages.

And something bothered me about this, that we don't seem to have a good way of talking about violence and the violations of individual political and economic rights in development, and we just give y- you know, un- unblemished approval to anyone who produces high GDP growth.

So I thought, "You know, I'm not, I'm struggling to have a good response to this.

Given your view about the, the, the, the distorting effects of aid, is there i- are you a little more hopeful than the, the about the consequences of this? Or do you think it's all folly? I mean, obviously, I think it's fair for me to guess, to assume, that whatever you wanted to do with USAID, y- you would not do it on a whim overnight the way it was done, right? That said, you know, that's, uh, you know, it's like Mancur Olson says the one way to, like, get rid of the sclerosis in a system is to destroy it with war, you know? You don't wanna be in favor of war but like, is there an upside here to what's going on with USAID?