Dr. Tom Palmer and Matt Warner’s new book Development with Dignity available today

How can we rethink the fight against poverty and address the weaknesses of the traditional aid model? Atlas Network’s Dr. Tom Palmer and Matt Warner answer that very question in their new book, Development with Dignity: Self-determination, Localization, and the End to Poverty, available now from the prestigious Routledge publishing house. The path forward for international development must incorporate a deep regard for human dignity, they write. Only by implementing local problem-solving and ingenuity can we truly eradicate poverty.

The traditional model of development needs to change. Development with Dignity presents the latest thinking on how outsiders can best support local vision for change. The dignity-centered approach to international development laid out in this book affords local knowledge the dignity it deserves. When individuals are valued as self-governing agents and agents of change in their own communities, they are empowered to build better lives and more stable institutions.

This book outlines a localization approach to strengthening the institutions that accelerate poverty’s decline and explains how aid agencies, philanthropists, and think tanks can adopt this model. Development with Dignity is required reading for any student of international development. Be sure to order your copy today.

“The liberalism of Warner and Palmer could be called ‘adultism.’ The other policies—of a statist right or a statist left or for that matter a statist middle—all treat adults as bad children or sad children. Poor things, poor things, they’re waiting to be fed. On the contrary, adults are to be accorded the dignity of ‘the equal presumption of liberty and citizen-based democratic political principles’ . . . You need this lucid and eloquent book. Read it, right away. No time to waste . . . .”

-Deirdre N. McCloskey, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

“Read this book and you will be introduced to new perspectives on the power of local knowledge—rooted in human experience—to fuel sustainable development and to generate the socio-economic wealth of nations.”

-Vernon L. Smith, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences

“Development with Dignity is an outstanding contribution to the public discourse addressing the intimate relationships between universal rights, human dignity, and economic prosperity. Adam Smith’s liberal plan of liberty, equality, and justice is restated and grounded in the latest research in the social sciences and humanities, and readers will learn of the power of entrepreneurship to improve lives as individuals as they are empowered to pursue productive specialization and realize social cooperation through mutually beneficial exchange. As a result, these individuals experience greater freedom and prosperity. Palmer and Warner have produced a must-read book dealing with the most fundamental and important question in the social sciences.”

-Peter Boettke, George Mason University, USA