We can learn more about development from one block in SoHo than reading Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2014 Annual Letter.

That’s according to William Easterly, professor of economics and director of the Development Research Institute at New York University, and his new book The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor,.

Development really is a spontaneous order full of surprises, and cannot be ‘intelligently designed’ by a ruler or a philanthropist.

The block is Greene Street between Prince and Houston Streets, on the west side of Manhattan, not too far from NYU. Easterly notes that the street started as a residence for wealthy New Yorkers fleeing a yellow fever outbreak in 1782. But the street slowly declined, becoming known for its brothels. Later still, it became an industrial center and then–during New York’s decline in the 1970s, artists moved in to those abandoned industrial spaces. Now the cachet that those artists brought has taken the block full circle: It’s some of the most expensive real estate in the city, and home to an Apple Store.

“The story of that block shows how much development really is a spontaneous order full of surprises, and cannot be ‘intelligently designed’ by a ruler or a philanthropist,” Easterly explained.

The book contrasts that story with the story of development as we usually hear it from the Gates Foundation, The World Bank, USAID, and other leading development organizations.

Thanks to a combination of history, hubris, and human nature, Easterly says these institutions are captive to a view of the development process that is not only not the way development happens, but inadvertently undermines the real root cause of development.

Read the opposite side of the debate, in Bill and Melinda Gates’s most recent letter about their work.

“In his 2013 annual letter, Bill Gates praised the government of Ethiopia for what it had accomplished in the fall in child mortality,” Easterly said. “That’s a real ‘intelligent design’ kind of view: that child mortality is under the control of this conscious designer that happens to be the ruler of Ethiopia and if it falls it’s because he wanted it to fall and he should be celebrated. And that winds up celebrating an authoritarian oppressor who puts peaceful bloggers in jail and violates human rights.”