A quote on the cause of poverty from William Easterly's 'The Tyranny of Experts'

[Scuba]

"The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights. The emphasis on the problem of expertise makes the problem of rights worse. The technical problems of the poor (and the absence of technical solutions for those problems) are a symptom of poverty, not a cause of poverty. The cause of poverty is the absence of political and economic rights, the absence of a free political and economic system that would find the technical solutions to the poor’s problems. The dictator whom the experts expect will accomplish the technical fixes to technical problems is not the solution; he is the problem."

~ William Easterly, 'The Tyranny of Experts'

[bemildred]

1. "The emphasis on the problem of expertise makes the problem of rights worse."

Exactly, it becomes the new class system, "experts" and all us "non-experts".

[MisterP]

2. neoliberalism is definitely technocratic:

and it was the technocrats' unfulfilled (because impossible) promises that created the (well-sponsored) religious backlashes in America and the Mideast and collapsed Mexico into cartelandia (since the technocrats' rabble-repression forces easily took to drugrunning once the economy didn't grow for ever and ever)