Easterly’s people come from the hills of West Virginia.
My name is William Easterly. I was born in West Virginia, and I grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio.
I think being born in West Virginia, and having my parents and grandparents from West
Virginia gave me a lot of awareness of poverty from the time I was very young. My parents
and grandparents were not well off. They would not think of themselves as poor, but they
were just barely removed from being poor, Appalachian hill farmers. And the way they were
barely removed from that was by hard work and education. Their example really inspired me a
lot. And growing up in a small town in Ohio kind of gave me those old small town,
Midwestern values. You know, not take yourself too seriously, be humble, don’t make too
much of yourself, don’t be too full of yourself. Somebody sent me a link to a Wikipedia website
on Bowling Green, Ohio, and I found that I’m the eighth most famous person in Bowling
Green, Ohio. I thought that was hilarious.
Well one of them was a Playboy Playmate, so it’s obvious about how I lost out to her. The
most famous person from Bowling Green is Scott Hamilton who is an Olympic figure
skating champion.
Well definitely my grandmother. My grandmother, once again, was a West Virginian. Grew
up among poor people in the hills of West Virginia, but she just placed tremendous emphasis
on reading, and knowledge, and education, and literature. She was an English
schoolteacher herself. She had a college degree herself, which was very unusual in West
Virginia in her generation. And she was very proud of me when I started to read and started to
do well in school. She really inspired me tremendously.
Well I came to economics through two different paths. One is that as an intellectual matter, I
loved mathematics. And economics is a very mathematical science. But also I had a young
college student’s idealism about wanting to change the world, wanting to make
society better, and wanting to make poor people better off. This was maybe a little reinforced by
a year that I spent in my childhood in West Africa. I spent a year – the year between when I
was between ages 12 and 13 – in Cape Coast, Ghana on the coast of West Africa. And
being exposed to that degree of poverty, which was even a whole other level of poverty
beyond what I had seen in West Virginia, I think that also was a big influence on me in wanting
to do something to help poor people around the world; wanting to find a way, a social science that helped poor people around the world. And economics was really a natural home for that love. Recorded On: 7/6/07