Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Co-operation in a Complex World. By Ben Ramalingam. Oxford University Press; 440 pages; $40 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. By William Easterly. Basic Books; 394 pages; $29.99 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE fat reports favoured by international development agencies are full of lofty goals like “making poverty history”, not to mention grand claims about big victories. By contrast, people who work in development prefer tales about bizarre schemes and massive cock-ups. Two new books provide myriad examples of this, from malaria-reduction efforts that inadvertently lead to the rise of resistant strains to American agricultural techniques exported wholesale to places with other systems of land ownership. Given all this, it comes as no surprise that neither Ben Ramalingam, of Britain’s Overseas Development Institute, nor William Easterly, an economist at New York University, is a fan of the idea of development as something the West and its experts export to the Rest.

Yet this view of development informs much of what the aid industry does. Both authors believe this has a lot to do with a deep-rooted tendency for development experts to think of poverty or underdevelopment as a sort of technical problem in search of a suitable (and often simple) technical fix. Think this way, and it is but a short step to what Mr Ramalingam memorably calls “best-practicitis”: viewing the benighted poor in developing countries as waiting for “best practices” to be “delivered” to them. Nor is it surprising that agencies in search of restoratives quickly come to see the solutions they have available as the appropriate ones for the situation at hand. The result of all this, Mr Ramalingam argues, is a lot of time spent trying to find “ways to do the wrong thing righter”.

Both men prefer to let solutions bubble up from below, rather than imposing them from above. The most interesting part of Mr Ramalingam’s book, “Aid on the Edge of Chaos”, is his discussion of how some agencies are beginning to learn from the way poor people can successfully do difficult things—such as bringing up well-nourished children on meagre incomes—without external experts or programmes. Learning from such “positive deviants”, but also experimenting repeatedly and quickly, has much to offer the world of aid.

Of course, the poor must be able to devise such strategies in the first place. This leads to the core of Mr Easterly’s argument in “The Tyranny of Experts”, which is that development needs to be founded on individual economic and political rights. He is right that development from above often ignores these rights. Sometimes, as when experts impose solutions which locals do not want, it rides roughshod over them.

This is thought-provoking. But both books flounder when they try to draw out larger lessons. Aid agencies ignore complexity to their own detriment. So it seems fair enough to argue, as Mr Ramalingam does, that they must listen, learn from their mistakes and then adapt their solutions. But Mr Ramalingam’s enthusiasm for the emerging science of “complex adaptive systems” as a pillar of how aid needs to be rethought feels premature. The world that aid deals with is indeed a complex, adaptive system, but it is far from clear that the science of such systems has evolved to the point where it can guide the actions of agencies in practice. It does not help that the discussion of the science sometimes resembles management-speak.

Mr Easterly is at his trenchant best when demolishing various bits of received wisdom about development, whether about the role of strong leaders or the idea that policymakers actually know how to choose the right policies. Often they do not; nor do economists. This makes it harder to share his confidence that securing individual rights will do the trick. Rights clearly matter, but there is also a lot of evidence that individuals, like policymakers, do not make efficient use of all the information available. Instead they often rely on quick, flawed rules of thumb to guide their decisions. Securing rights may be necessary, but it is unlikely to be sufficient.

Mr Easterly claims that the “difference between individualist and collectivist values” is one of the great divides that explains why Western Europe prospered in the early modern age as the rest of the old world fell behind. True, Westerners today stress things like self-reliance, where East Asians might value group loyalty. Yet history surely matters here. The notion of development that Messrs Easterly and Ramalingam critique is itself the product of history, as Mr Easterly indeed points out. Diverging values may well be the consequence of different economic histories rather than their cause.