When I meet people and they ask what I do, I’m often met with a skeptical eye when explaining my promotion of private sector strategies for development. This recent article succinctly describes why. It’s an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Perkins worked for 10 years as a highly successful ‘economic hit man’ for a major American engineering and construction firm. “An economic hit man works by making excessively optimistic projections of economic growth in a developing country, seducing the business and political elite into borrowing vast sums for hydroelectric projects, road building, industrial development and the like. The net result enriches the elite while despoiling the environment, eroding traditional indigenous life and casting much of the population into abject poverty.