Customer Reviews

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

William Easterly, a New York University economics professor who previously worked at the World Bank, divides the international development aid community into two groups: there are planners, who have grandiose large-scale utiopian plans for ending poverty, and there are searchers, who favor piecemeal interventions by finding things that actually work. Planners have good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry out their plan or hold anyone responsible for getting results. Searchers, on the other hand, find out first what the poor need then try to meet the demand.

Easterly has special contempt for aging rock stars such as Bono and Bob Geldof for soliciting money for large anti-poverty programs, but he gets apoplectic when he talks about Jeffrey Sachs' book "The End of Poverty" - which he gave a scathing review in the Washington Post. Easterly does not believe that ending poverty is a valid policy goal. He says its like mandating that a cow should win the Kentucky Derby. Anger brings out some strange analogies. Sachs represents everything that Easterly thinks is wrong with the development community.

To drive home the point, Easterly argues how "the West spent $2.3 trillion in foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get 12 cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths."

Easterly likes repeating the $2.3 trillion to emphasize how the West keeps spending and getting very meager results. Let me add one of my own: the US has incurred $2.3 trillion worth of new debt in the last five years with very little to show for it. The question is: does this spending do good or ill? What would Africa and the rest of the developing world look like if this money had not been spent? Would they be prosperous and democratic? Easterly fails to explain why aid has done "so much ill." It is pretty obvious that many of the grand development schemes of the planners have failed, but it is not obvious that these societies would have been better off without aid.

The critique of large-scale planning made in the West may appeal, at first glance, to free traders who call for market solutions to solve the problems associated with poverty. However, he is also critical of those who attempt to "plan" markets. (Think of Sachs' "big bang" market schemes for Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.) His years at the World Bank have made him very cynical about imposing "Washington Consensus" on other countries.

The approach favored by Easterly is to examine each culture individually and offer aid specific to local conditions. Sounds good. He offers many case studies that are very compelling, yet it is difficult to draw many conclusions because they are specific to each situation. Many of his case studies showed that aid administered actually helped rather than hindered development. One of the conclusions drawn, however, is that healthcare and primary education are two areas where aid has been successful.

In the end, Easterly and Sachs have more in common than Easterly would like to acknowledge. They both believe that it is important for the West to give aid to the rest, and that it is important that those providing aid get results and be held accountable. Where they differ is that Easterly adamantly believes that the large scale planning administered by organizations such as the UN and the World Bank will never reach the people that need it. He might be right.

This book is an important contribution to reforming the development community.

Easterly's central theme is that the West is spending a fortune on foreign aid yet cheap simple things (bed nets for $4, malaria medicine at 20c a dose) don't get delivered to the poor. Increasing spending isn't the answer as it isn't lack of money that is causing these failures. Easterly lays the blame on high-level utopian planning that is far too disjoint from what the poor need.

He presents data that shows that economic success isn't tied to aid delivery and that aid programs have done very little to help the poor. But the West keeps applying the same broken formulas. Easterly asserts that what is needed isn't more money, but better spending.

Easterly argues that it is easy to dream up grand utopian plans, but these are typically focused on making the donors feel good and ignore the realities of actual local situations and needs. There is no feedback loop from the intended recipients, so money is easily lost or wasted. He argues that more aid should be driven by what he calls "Searchers" (bottom-up pragmatists) and much less by "Planners" (top-down bureaucrats). The West shouldn't seek to reform countries or economies wholesale. Rather it should work on delivering lots of piecemeal localized improvements that can be individually analyzed, evaluated, and either abandoned or refined.

He gives examples of the vast bureaucratic efforts spent on aid summits, planning frameworks and reports. These consume lots of energy in both the aid organizations and (worse) in the over-burdened target governments. He recycles the amusing point that if you apply the standard doctrines of two of the largest aid agencies (the World Bank and the IMF) to the aid process itself, they would insist that it abandon central planning and grand schemes and instead move to privatization and market-based mechanisms.

He observes that many of the target governments are wildly dysfunctional. Aid money (like oil revenue) is treated as a resource that can be exploited. However, in his proposed solutions he tends to ignore that aspect. If governments have a tendency to steal or misspend their aid budgets, then donor groups are bound to demand detailed plans and reports. And I doubt if those governments will tolerate groups that try to bypass them. Unfortunately it is exactly those countries with the worst governments that most need help.

Easterly sometimes comes across as overly dogmatic in his emphasis on "Searchers" and his attacks on "Planners". However he does a good job of making his core points: the West should show much more humility, avoid grand plans and look for detailed programs that actually help the poor and allow for both feedback and remedy.

"Give a man a fish and he won't go hungry for a day." The western world has sent a lot of 'fish' to Africa, well-intentioned charity, food, foreign aid, clothing, supplies. But too much of those 'fish' have ended up rotting in warehouses, in the hands of government officials and not people who need the fish, or putting local fisherman out of business, when they can't compete with free fish distribution.

"Teach a man to fish, but he won't go hungry again." Nice idea, but sometimes there aren't any fish in the sea, or the people don't live near water, or they end up overfishing the waters. Some western practices don't fit the climate or culture of Africa, so all the fishing instruction in the world won't solve the systemic problem.

"Teach a village to raise fish." Now we have something. A skill. A chance at economic development. Not for one person, for lots of persons. Something enduring. Africa needs help in learning to help itself. That doesn't mean that starving people should be ignored. It means that feeding them for a day, a month or a year does not solve the long-term problems of Africa. Worse, this charity leaves some people satisfied that they have done their share of social responsibility and leaves some people -- westerners and Africans --mad that fish are being given away.

Easterly shows that the first form of fish relief, however well-intentioned and executed, perhaps does more harm than good. And he knows that teaching fishing is sometimes not that helpful. But long-term, sustainable, wealth-creating, economic development works. Microenterprise, microfinance, granting people title to land that they can leverage into loans -- these are some of the tools that we can teach and that Africans can use. Yes, the west has done many, many things in Africa about which we can feel guilty, but charity is not the solution or the ablution.

Don't just give a person this book. Make sure he reads it.

Reviewed by Manfred Wolf, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Review, Sunday, March 19, 2006, pages M1 and M5.

William Easterly puts the failure of foreign aid down to a gigantic act of non-listening, of imposing grand schemes on hapless, desperate countries. Easterly, now a professor of economics at New York University, was for 16 years a senior research economist at the World Bank.

In his latest book, "The White Man's Burden," he sets himself against his former employers, as well as the International Monetary Fund, and by extension against such utopians as the economist Jeffrey Sachs, for being "Planners," who impose grandly conceived solutions that the recipients can't or won't implement and for which the donors are not held accountable. (That the most grandiose form of Planning, large-scale military intervention, is equally futile should not surprise anyone.)

When there are successes, these usually result from limited undertakings. Aid organizations can score with such projects as Food for Education in Bangladesh, a stipend for parents who send their children to school, or the Rural Roads Program in Peru, but these do not flow from grandiose schemes. More commonly, successes in the huge foreign aid programs of the past 50 years derive from "Searchers," people who devise small programs with limited goals -- vaccination schemes or sanitation improvements -- that often originate locally with people searching for remedies. Because the world's poorest
have the least clout, the need for Searchers is all the greater.

To illustrate one such Searcher, Easterly tells the story first related by John Stackhouse in his book "Out of Poverty and Into Something More Comfortable," of a Ugandan chemist, George B. Mpango. To combat undernourishment, Mpango developed a high-protein biscuit -- no thanks to the aid community, which sent instruments to the chemist's lab he didn't ask for and didn't want, "since donors give us what they have, not what we need." Worse still is that aid organizations often reject local initiatives, such as helping to fund a university in Ghana founded by a U.S.-educated entrepreneur. It's almost as if the aid agencies feel they know best, condescension apparently still clinging to these efforts as when Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase that gives this book its title.

The snapshot of the Ugandan chemist is one of many scattered throughout the book, sketches of successes and heartbreaks. Easterly is keenly aware of the tragedy of world poverty and clearly upset by the inability of so many to engage it. Most of the countries that have received huge amounts of foreign aid
are now poorer than ever, though of course AIDS and wars and bad governments have contributed to making them so.

"The White Man's Burden" is almost a reference work of solutions and dilemmas, histories and prospects. Easterly touches on many subjects, ranging from the complexities of aid bureaucracies to the political contradictions of recent Western policies to the relative success of Asian economies in the past few decades. His book is filled with charts and graphs but still written in the same engaging, detail-rich style that characterized his earlier "The Elusive Quest for Growth." Among his many details is the news that sometimes corporations do better than nongovernmental organizations, known as NGOs, or Western government agencies. Thus the Shell Foundation has fought the catastrophe of African indoor smoke by thinking like Searchers and helping to set up small enterprises to produce affordable smoke-reducing stoves that will actually be used by people who need them -- this from a charitable foundation created by Shell Oil.

Not that oil ever appears to be a blessing for an otherwise poor country. Easterly explains that oil revenues ensure that the well-connected and privileged fight harder against redistribution than they otherwise would. One should think there are other reasons as well for the curse of oil, for instance, in oil-rich countries the incentives for economic diversification lessen and poor people inevitably suffer from the presence of vast amounts of money, which their lack of skills keep them from sharing. But it's fascinating to read Easterly make the point that oil revenues and large amounts of for eign aid work about the same way and bring neither democratization nor prosperity.

Equally fascinating -- and downright counterintuitive -- is that poor, developing countries have a better chance at democracy and development than do those
burdened with great natural resources. This, too, points up the need for limited, manageable help. Limited solutions for specific problems are, of course, good and sensible, but Easterly doesn't fully address why, in Africa at least, even those attempts frequently fail: a cultural clash, perhaps, between donors and recipients, with the latter's loyalty often to tribe over community, family over country. Nationhood seems irrelevant. Postcolonial Africa's nations were artificially created and are now forced to live in -- and compete with -- a world of nation-states. They have been dragged into globalized economies where they perform poorly, while some of their people are mesmerized by images of life in Europe and America.

No wonder many of them try to rush the shores of Europe rather than build up their impoverished homelands, a movement of people that Easterly's otherwise excellent book does not take fully into account in its description of what has gone wrong with aid in particular and with relations in general between the West and the rest.

A Manfred Wolf teaches literature and the history of ideas at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco.

If you've ever asked yourself why so much of the world is so screwed up, you might want to read this book. It is said that author William Easterly was practically driven out of his position at the World Bank after positing some of his theories, and from the bit of experience I have had with international development agencies, I can well believe it.

In short, Easterly points to Western aid dollars as the source of much of the misery in the so-called "developing" world. He traces in particular the United States' policies of giving billions to corrupt, authoritarian regimes not because they could be relied upon to use the aid to help their peoples, but because they were of (often dubious) strategic importance to US foreign policy interests. It's a long, complicated story, but told in a straightforward way that makes this book engaging reading.

Easterly doesn't let the Europeans off the hook either, with England, France and Belgium faring especially poorly. If you saw the film Hotel Rwanda you will have some idea of the role that Belgium played in setting the stage for tribal warfare when it abruptly pulled out of the Congo area early last century. And then there is the perennial mess in the Middle East, a great deal of which, according to Easterly, is a legacy of England's bungling at border-drawing after WWI.

All of this is detailed in a chapter toward the end of the book called From Colonialism to Post-Modern Imperialism, which draws some thoughtful parallels between the meddling that the US is doing today in Iraq and various countries around the world, and similar forays conducted by the European powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This chapter alone is well worth the price of this well-written and enlightening book.

William Easterly has done it again. It's hard to believe that there would be much left to say about the mess that has been development aid after his devastating critique in The Elusive Quest for Growth. However, five more year of observation and research on Easterly's part have created an even more comprehensive picture of the problem than his earlier book.
Here is what I particularly liked about this new book:
* Less economic analysis (though there is still plenty to interest the serious reader) and more fascinating anecdotes, so this is more appropriate for the general reader than Elusive Quest.
* Same lively writing style; it's a page-turner.
* Wonderful case histories of sucessful countries like Botswana, thus a little more hopeful feel to this book.
* Marvelous histories of the colonial powers and their impact on the countries they conquered (now I finally know who the Moguls were and what they did to India and then what the British did to them and India...)
* A very sobering history of the impact of our military actions on poor countries
* A really funny section quoting endless, jargon-laden, non-specific silly UN and World Bank reports that underscores why international bureaucracies who deal with corrupt governments accomplish nothing
* Finally, although he denies that there are any big solutions, he does end the book with a few clever suggestions
No matter what your political leanings, if you care about the world's poor you need at the very least to be informed about the damage good intentions wrongly applied can do. This book will do that for you in a very entertaining manner.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Africa -- but someone without a lot of formal training in macroeconomics or knowledge of the politics and history of the IMF, World Bank, and associated other organizations -- I picked this book up hoping for a cogent and intelligent perspective on the "larger picture" driving what I observed on the ground. I wasn't disappointed.

Easterly arrives at many of the same conclusions I did, backed up with reams of analysis and a deep understanding of the nature of the IMF, World Bank, etc., as well as the historical roots explaining why they are the way they are. I found the book to be slow-going in parts, but that's probably more because much of the content was totally new to me: it's dense, but that's a good thing. And even though it is dense, I thought it was very readable.

One thing that I thought would have been valuable was more of a discussion about how a foreign policy oriented around a bottom-up, "Searcher" type approach could be sold. He acknowledges that the reason "Planner" solutions are so popular is that they make us feel good, like "something is being done" -- but, unfortunately, the psychological power of that is so strong that a fundamental shift in policy will not occur simply on the basis of rational evidence that it doesn't work. That said, I don't think it's impossible: it's just about appealing to a different aspect of our psychology. Peace Corps, for instance, I think does a pretty good job of selling the Searcher ethos, and it does so by emphasizing the small-scale stories of success, as well as the OTHER benefits of being a Searcher (such as learning from the other cultures). A Searcher-based foreign policy, on the larger scale, could sell itself similarly -- buzzwords like "empowerment" and "grassroots" spring to mind. Anyway, I would have appreciated more of a discussion about that (or, if these ideas are silly, a discussion of exactly why).

Still, this book is important reading for anyone interested in foreign policy and foreign aid. And it should be required reading for the people in charge of such things.

At the World Economic Forum in 2007, author William Easterly gave the audience some distressing news: The $2.3 trillion in aid sent to Africa since the 1950s had done nothing to increase Africa's GDP. It had been largely a waste of money. Bill Gates, who was sitting next to Easterly that day, admonished the author for focusing on narrowly economic benchmarks: "You don't eat GDP," Gates said petulantly. Easterly's riposte came a few days later in The Wall Street Journal, where he chided the world's richest college dropout for missing "the economics class that listed the components of GDP, such as food." Readers who enjoy such debates will love this acerbic, clearheaded book. Easterly, a former World Bank economist who is fervently committed to global prosperity, demolishes the myths that prop up ineffective efforts to help developing nations. He points his wrecking-ball at photo-op celebrities and utopian economists who feel that big plans and big aid budgets will eventually build big economies (the last 50 years of contrary evidence notwithstanding). Ah, you say, at least they are trying to do something good, while many others simply watch the impoverished world's agony in dismay. Instead, the author argues, only alternative, pinpointed aid tactics can succeed, but only if they use local knowledge and implementation. We recommend this to anyone interested in economic development and emerging markets, and to lovers of intelligent polemic on issues that matter.

I have been a self-described Easterly fangirl since reading his excellent book The Elusive Quest for Growth. In that book, he had managed to be precise, supported, readable, humane and funny-- all at the same time. In the world of reading about development economics, this was no mean feat.

I had known that this book was out for a while, but had only gotten around to reading it after seeing Easterly here in Amsterdam. He was debating Jan Pronk about what he calls the difference between Planner- and Searcher-based methods of developmental aid. Planners, in his terms, prefer the sweeping top-down approaches to poverty eradication-- all governed by a central committee somewhere else. Searchers adopt a more piecemeal approach to solutions, looking from the bottom up without benefit (or as much benefit) from Utopian ideals. It was a very interesting debate. The audience was full of folks working in various NGOs and developmental organization. It inspired me enough to go ahead and buy The White Man's Burden.

The arguments that Easterly make feel so intuitively correct that they make me suspicious. The bottom line for him seems to be that real situations are individual, and solutions cannot be extrapolated from overriding principles. He is savage towards the unrealistic thinking of the neo-imperialists and unsparing of many of the political sacred cows. He points out that given limited resources, tradeoffs do have to be made. Too many people forget that even given unlimited funding (which is far from the case), resources can still be scarce-- attention, will power, distribution infrastructure, etc. He also says that if goals in aid programs are failing, then throwing more money at them will not help.

I think that Easterly's stand is often miscontrued based on the last point. I have heard detractors say that he is arguing towards limiting aid to the needy poor. There is no substantiation of that-- at least not in his books or in the lecture I attended. Instead, what he argues is that if unrealistic goals and cumbersome structures prevent aid from reaching the poorest, then adding more money on top of the pile will not fix the problem. For any experienced project managers out there, this is going to feel very "right". Easterly is not calling for less spending; he is calling for more sensible spending. He is calling for accountability, practicality, focus and honest evaluation. These are things that should be self-evident, but are apparently very difficult to achieve. He asks the very disturbing question whether the developed countries are more interested in selling their personal ideology in the form of a Utopian vision than they are interested in achieving real change on the ground where it is needed the most.

Other topics include examples of successful "Searcher" strategies for bringing change to the life of the poor; historical numbers looking at the effect of aid on growth; a discussion of the different aid agencies and their limitations; and some thinking about the role (or lack of one) in local governments when it comes to development initiatives.

The White Man's Burden is, as The Elusive Quest for Growth, precise, supported, readable, humane and funny. I think that it is in many respects a stronger book as it better integrates the stories of the poor with the structure. There are many fascinating pointers for further reading. I would have appreciated an annotated bibliography instead of just pulling references from the notes, but I guess that you cannot have everything that you want in a single book. Recommended reading.

I found The White Man's Burden frustrating and illuminating at the same time. I was frustrated by the fact that despite masses of foreign aid little seems to have helped Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the other areas known as "the Rest". It was illuminating in that William Easterly oes such a good job of analyzing the reasons why so much good will and so much money have accomplished so little.

Basically, Westerners who seek to help the rest of the world have largely been Planners, Easterly's term for people and organizations who think the way to help others is to help them become more like themselves. Despite historic, cultural, religious, and a host of other differences, the West tries to improve the Rest by trying to make it into a New West. On the other hand, there are the Searchers, who try to find ways to help and to help the Rest help itself. Unfortunately, too many agencies and too many powerful people are Planners, and far too few are Searchers. Easterly dissects the failures of the Planners and compares them with the successes of Searchers in a scholarly, well researched manner that leaves room for the occasional witticism.

As I read The White Man's Burden I recognized so many of the same problems that I, as a public school teacher, face dealing with bureaucracies full of Planners, who think the way to solve a problem is to come up with a big overall Scheme and throw tons of money around, usually unsuccessfully. Easterly has performed a valuable service by revealing the problem and identifying the solutions. Maybe someday the Searchers will be in charge!