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The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good Paperback – Illustrated, February 27, 2007
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"Brilliant at diagnosing the failings of Western intervention in the Third World." —BusinessWeek
In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man’s Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch—a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West’s economic policies for the world’s poor. Sometimes angry, sometimes irreverent, but always clear-eyed and rigorous, Easterly argues that we in the West need to face our own history of ineptitude and draw the proper conclusions, especially at a time when the question of our ability to transplant Western institutions has become one of the most pressing issues we face.
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateFebruary 27, 2007
- Dimensions5.52 x 0.94 x 8.38 inches
- ISBN-100143038826
- ISBN-13978-0143038825
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Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (February 27, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143038826
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143038825
- Item Weight : 14.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.52 x 0.94 x 8.38 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #606,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #344 in Poverty
- #470 in Globalization & Politics
- #484 in International Economics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU's Development Research Institute. He is editor of Aid Watch blog, Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. He is the author of The White Man's Burden: How the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), 3 co-edited books, and 61 articles in refereed economics journals. William Easterly received his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT. He was born in West Virginia and is the 8th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio, where he grew up. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank. He is on the board of the anti-malaria philanthropy, Nets for Life. His work has been discussed in media outlets like the Lehrer Newshour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor. Foreign Policy magazine inexplicably named him one of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008. His areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth, the political economy of development, and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. William Easterly is an associate editor of the American Economic Journals: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Comparative Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth. He is the baseball columnist for the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
Erratum: The above bio contains one factual mistake due to careless proofreading. He is not really the baseball columnist for L'Osservatore Romano.
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I though many of the arguments were carefully thought out and explained. I liked the graphs too.
The writer makes some valid points about his Seekers (people who are looking locally for problems) and Planners (people far away with plans) and why the seekers are better. One of these points I could relate too as it happened to me. A road had in front of my work place a big hole, so I rang the council up to get it fixed. They started to work the next day. Now I was thinking where would people in many poor African countries call. Often they cannot as the road builder is far away.
Some points I think that might add to the discussion that I think the writer would agree is much of the reasons for the problems with aid though is that the Planners are generally not free agents either. For example, a charity might be able to collect Y dollars for a fever and X dollars for fighting aids in some poor country. Now what is it supposed to do, ignore the X dollars for aids because the Y dollars are better spent. Another example might be the Australian government has a big surplus of wheat now; a Planner could come along and ask for it for a poor country. Okay I admit rice might be better but rice is not on offer here wheat is.
Another point I though is that seekers in poor countries in all likelihood have a similar success rate to businesspeople in the West. Most start-up businesses fail, probably most Seekers do too.
One problem I did notice of the book is about 3/4 of the way, he starts going on about what he believes are Western foreign interventions mistakes. I could disagree whether or not the US did intervene in many of these countries a brutalization would still have occurred. In many of these conflicts, the reason for invading had little to do with local but geopolitical reasons often they are not local problems but foreigner and its success/failure must be measured in these terms.
White Man's Burden is filled with empirical evidence that organizations like the IMF, World Bank and other poverty reducing multinational organizations have tended to exasperate structural deficiencies in failing nations. For instance by propping up poor and corrupt leadership and creating a system of dependency. There appears to be a direct inverse correlation between the levels of funding a country has received from the World Bank and the health of its finances. The author states that, "the right plan is to have no plan". His urge is to press for a bottom up approach that tries to tackle smaller problems. One of the great success stories has been in the area of reducing preventable deaths as in combating malaria and diarrhea. Another area of progress is in education. Unfortunately the IMF and World Bank have obsessed over large scale social engineering programs.
Iraq is the perfect example of top down social engineering. The country was invaded, shattered and rebuilt in the West's own image. Iraq's imposed structure is more than just an emulation of the West it is a neo-liberal's dream come true. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under Paul Bremer issued 100 Orders defined as "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people" with "penal consequences". These `Orders' were intended to create a free market economy with a highly regressive tax structure. The orders allowed 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi business, privatized Iraq's 200 state-owned enterprises, dropped corporate tax rate from 40% to 15% and capped income tax rates a 15%. Some rules like order #17 which granted foreign contractors full immunity from Iraq's laws is a slap in the face to the Iraqi people and Order #81 which prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture they have used for centuries seems reminiscent of something Chairman Mao would have dictated. Iraq is an extreme example but restructuring governments has been going on for hundreds of years going back to colonialization and rarely ends well. The IMF and World Bank need to stop trying to imagine that there is a one size fits all solution to poverty. They also need to realize that forcefully imposing economic planning on a country is anti-democratic and often benefits the few at the expense of many. Globalization and structural adjustments have only increased the disparity in wealth across the world by among other things devastating local farming.
The author's solution is to stop trying to throw more money at the problem. Address the problem in a market based manner with the poor as the consumer rather than the wealthy western countries. Analyze the effectiveness of programs and look for solutions that work. As Scrooge McDuck said, `Work smarter not harder'. Stop subsidizing dictators and change loans to grants (the IMF is already moving in this direction). As hard as it may be to accept sometimes the best solution is just to sit back and let things work themselves out on there own.
BTW: The current World Bank president, appointed by George W. Bush, is neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraqi war. How lovely.
Top reviews from other countries
A parte I é bem esclarecedora (1 - 163), a partir daí fica uma leitura mais cansativa e pouco proveitosa.
Highly recommended.
Un livre important pour quiconque s'intéresse au débat sur l'aide au développement aujourd'hui, bien loin des clichés habituels.





