William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU's Development Research Institute. He has been Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics, Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Comparative Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008 and 2009. Thomson Reuters listed him as one of Highly Cited Researchers of 2014. He is a Research Associate of NBER, and senior fellow at BREAD. 

He received his BA from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in Economics at MIT, after which he worked for 16 years as a Research Economist at the World Bank. The author of many scholarly journal articles, he also authored the books The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014), 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), and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001).