6.7 Billion Secrets of Development

The Global Economy and Development program at Brookings hosted the third meeting of its Global Young Professionals Program on June 5. The briefing brought together over 90 young professionals—the next generation of leaders working in the fields of global economics and development. The breakfast featured William Easterly, distinguished economist and development expert, who presented on 6.7 Billion Secrets of Development which brought to light the failure of many development “experts” to inspire economic growth and promoted social entrepreneurship and bottom-up development as a means to successful growth creation.

William Easterly is a visiting fellow with Brookings Global, and professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development.

William Easterly received his Ph.D. in economics at MIT. He spent 16 years as a research economist at the World Bank. He is the author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006); The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001); four other co-edited books; and 59 articles in refereed economics journals. His work has been discussed in numerous media outlets worldwide. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008.

Easterly’s areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth; the political economy of development; and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America and Russia. Easterly is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics.