Product Description

An informed and excoriating attack on the tragic waste, futility, and hubris of the West's efforts to date to improve the lot of the so-called developing world, with constructive suggestions on how to move forward.

William Easterly's The White Man's Burden is about what its author calls the twin tragedies of global poverty. The first, of course, is that so many are seemingly fated to live horribly stunted, miserable lives and die such early deaths. The second is that after fifty years and more than $2.3 trillion in aid from the West to address the first tragedy, it has shockingly little to show for it. We'll never solve the first tragedy, Easterly argues, unless we figure out the second.

The ironies are many: We preach a gospel of freedom and individual accountability, yet we intrude in the inner workings of other countries through bloated aid bureaucracies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that are accountable to no one for the effects of their prescriptions. We take credit for the economic success stories of the last fifty years, like South Korea and Taiwan, when in fact we deserve very little. However, we reject all accountability for pouring more than half a trillion dollars into Africa and other regions and trying one "big new idea" after another, to no avail. Most of the places in which we've meddled are in fact no better off or are even worse off than they were before. Could it be that we don't know as much as we think we do about the magic spells that will open the door to the road to wealth?

Absolutely, William Easterly thunders in this angry, irreverent, and important book. He contrasts two approaches: (1) the ineffective planners' approach to development-never able to marshal enough knowledge or motivation to get the overambitious plans implemented to attain the plan's arbitrary targets and (2) a more constructive searchers' approach-always on the lookout for piecemeal improvements to poor peoples' well-being, with a system to get more aid resources to those who find things that work. Once we shift power and money from planners to searchers, there's much we can do that's focused and pragmatic to improve the lot of millions, such as public health, sanitation, education, roads, and nutrition initiatives. We need to face our own history of ineptitude and learn our lessons, especially at a time when the question of our ability to "build democracy," to transplant the institutions of our civil society into foreign soil so that they take root, has become one of the most pressing we face.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38073 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
No one who attacks the humanitarian aid establishment is going to win any popularity contests, but, neither, it seems, is that establishment winning any contests with the people it is supposed to be helping. Easterly, an NYU economics professor and a former research economist at the World Bank, brazenly contends that the West has failed, and continues to fail, to enact its ill-formed, utopian aid plans because, like the colonialists of old, it assumes it knows what is best for everyone. Existing aid strategies, Easterly argues, provide neither accountability nor feedback. Without accountability for failures, he says, broken economic systems are never fixed. And without feedback from the poor who need the aid, no one in charge really understands exactly what trouble spots need fixing. True victories against poverty, he demonstrates, are most often achieved through indigenous, ground-level planning. Except in its early chapters, where Easterly builds his strategic platform atop a tower of statistical analyses, the book's wry, cynical prose is highly accessible. Readers will come away with a clear sense of how orthodox methods of poverty reduction do not help, and can sometimes worsen, poor economies. (Mar. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
This is the season for critiques of global misadventures, and William Easterly has written a valuable one. His target in his puckishly titled The White Man's Burden is the spirit of benign meddling that lies behind foreign aid, foreign military interventions and such do-gooder institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations. In his account, such efforts are fatally contaminated by what the philosopher Karl Popper called "utopian social engineering." Easterly's list of well-meaning villains stretches from the economist Jeffrey Sachs to the rock singer and charity impresario Bono.

His analysis is depressing but quite readable -- thanks largely to his skill in giving lively names and conceptual handles to his explanations for why the West's charitable works in fact accomplish "so much ill and so little good." The do-gooders' fundamental flaw, he argues, is that they are "Planners," who seek to impose solutions from the top down, rather than "Searchers," who adapt to the real life and culture of foreign lands from the bottom up. The Planners believe in "the Big Push" -- an infusion of foreign aid and economic advice that will lift poor countries past the poverty trap and into prosperity. But the Planners are almost always wrong, Easterly contends, because they ignore the cultural, political and bureaucratic obstacles that impede the delivery of real assistance (as opposed to plans for such assistance) to the world's poor. "The right plan is to have no plan," he asserts, in an economist's version of a Zen koan.

Think of Easterly as a kind of anti-Thomas L. Friedman. His dyspeptic view of globalization contrasts with the optimism of the New York Times columnist, but he has written his broadside in a brisk, Friedman-esque style of aphorisms, anecdotes and witty headings. Some of his section and chapter titles convey the breezy tone in which he delivers his gloomy analysis: "Why Planners Cannot Bring Prosperity"; "The Legend of the Big Push"; "The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats." Scattered throughout the book are upbeat "Snapshots" of poor Africans and Asians whom Easterly, now an economics professor at New York University, met on his travels during more than 16 years spent working as a World Bank development economist; he also offers portraits of the "Searchers" who are helping the developing world.

I confess that I occasionally began to find all the aphorisms and snapshots annoying; there actually is such a thing as a book about development economics that is too readable. And I would have been happier if his sainted Searchers had been subject to a bit more of the same skepticism that Easterly applies to the odious Planners. Not to diminish the "social entrepreneurs" whom Easterly celebrates, but their well-publicized efforts are a bit of a racket too. I've met with and marveled at some of the same African and Asian innovators Easterly applauds, but it is a tad utopian to think that these little examples will add up to big changes, absent the fundamental reforms for which Easterly has such scorn. For instance, he praises the success of an NGO called Population Services International in finding a way for poor Africans to make a profit distributing the bed nets that can prevent malaria. But surely the challenge for development economists is to find ways to replicate such efforts on a larger scale, which involves the dreaded "P" word.

What makes this book valuable is its devastating detail. Easterly, the author of an influential previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, has assembled overwhelming evidence of how little has been accomplished with the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid money, the thousands of advisory missions, the millions of reports and studies. Rebutting the "Big Push" idea favored by World Bank planners, he notes that 22 African countries spent $342 billion on public investment from 1970 to 1994 and received another $187 billion in foreign aid over that period. But the productivity gain from all this investment was zero. As an example of the Planners' folly, he cites the $5 billion spent since 1979 on a publicly owned steel mill in Nigeria that has yet to produce any steel.

Easterly's critique of the World Bank and the IMF is persuasive. He argues that the IMF's structural-adjustment lending -- in which indebted countries get more money on the condition that they agree to Planners' free-market reforms -- simply hasn't worked. One big reason is that the IMF, like the World Bank, is always fudging its failures, finding excuses for why past aid and advice haven't worked, discovering reasons to pump in even more assistance. Indeed, Easterly finds a freakish correlation between IMF interventions and failed states. He notes the role corruption has played in distorting foreign aid and the growing insistence of aid donors on "good governance." But he cautions that attempting to change political cultures from afar often produces a show of good governance -- like the 2,400 reports Tanzania must produce every year for aid donors -- rather than the real thing. The absurdity of this hortatory culture emerges in his observation that among the 185 actions recommended by the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development was "efficient use of cow dung."

With all of Easterly's aid-bashing, one might imagine that he is a conservative promoter of market solutions. But some of his most powerful criticism is reserved for the Planners who advocated "shock therapy" free-market reforms in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Free markets can't be imposed from outside, he insists, citing the example of the inefficient Soviet-era plants that survived their entry into the market era via their communist bosses' genius for bartering and cronyism. "The Soviet-trained plant managers at the bottom outwitted the shock therapists at the top," he writes. He finds a similar failure of free-market diktats in Latin America. The best era for Latin American growth was 1950 to 1980, the heyday of state intervention, while growth slowed in the market-reform years of the 1990s. As a result, Easterly argues, "the backlash against free markets is unfortunately now gaining strength in Latin America."

So what works? Easterly's argument is that if it's imposed from the outside, almost nothing works -- in either the economic or political sphere. It's no accident, he argues, that the great East Asian economic success stories of recent decades -- Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand -- all took place in countries that were never successfully colonized by the West. These nations evolved their own cultures, rules and disciplines and built an indigenous foundation for rapid economic growth. The region's laggard is the one nation that was colonized: the Philippines.

Easterly's dissection of the interventionist impulse of the Planners is powerful. His enthusiasm for the bottom-up successes of the Searchers is less so. He's looking hard for something encouraging to say, but it's a measure of the potency of his corrosive analysis that the good news isn't very convincing.

Reviewed by David Ignatius
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* As the dictator of Haiti for decades, Papa Doc Duvalier had good reasons--tens of millions of them--to praise international aid agencies for their generosity. As a former analyst in the World Bank system that coordinates such generosity, Easterly thinks it is time to start listening to people other than corrupt dictators and self-congratulatory bureaucrats in assessing international-aid projects. Though he acknowledges that such projects have succeeded in some tasks--reducing infant mortality, for example--Easterly adduces sobering evidence that Western nations have accomplished depressingly little with the trillions they have spent on foreign aid. That evidence suggests that in some countries--including Haiti, Zaire, and Angola--foreign aid has actually intensified the suffering of the poor. By examining the tortured history of several aid initiatives, he shows how blind and arrogant Western aid officers have imposed on helpless clients a postmodern neocolonialism of political manipulation and economic dependency, stifling democracy and local enterprise in the process. Easterly forcefully argues that an ambitious new round of Western aid programs will help the suffering poor only if those who manage them wake up from the ideological fantasy of global omniscience and begin the difficult search for piecemeal local approaches, rigorously monitoring the results of every project. Proffering no blueprint for bringing poverty and disease to an end, Easterly does set the terms for a debate over how to give foreign aid a new start. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

How Global Aid became a Cash Laden Cow instead of a Thoroughbred Racehorse (or Bureaucracies eat oats too, don't they?)
Here, William Easterly lifts the veil of fog and proceeds to make a big dent in our collective ignorance about the "ways of global poverty" and in the process tells us what "not to do" in trying to surmount it. His trenchant critique gives a whole new meaning to the biblical philosophy: Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day, but teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime," as well as to the well-worn adage that "the road to hell many times has been paved with good intentions."

Always sharp, relevant, wise and delivered with the authority of a man who has "been there, done that, and bought the tee shirt," This is the testimony of a man who has wrestled in the trenches with the problem of global poverty and lost so many times that he has now figured out what he and everyone else have been doing wrong. He is like the "Archie Moore of Global Aid programs." And at least in principle Easterly now knows the score and what needs to be done to get global poverty right. His experience, his logic, his tenacity, the crispness but lightness of his writing, and his bravery in taking on the conventional wisdom (and all of its embedded sacred cows), convinces me that Easterly is the real deal; and that if he does not know what he is talking about then no one does.

His story has the full ring of truth. It is one born both out of compassion and frustration. He is tactful, and gingerly tips around the currently reigning gurus and heroes of the global poverty fight, and here I mean such heroes as Jeffery Sachs, Gordon Brown and even Madonna and Bono. His story can be summarized somewhat as follows:

While beautiful heartfelt and compassionate ideas coupled with a plan and money (so far the West has spent more than $2.3 trillion with minimal results), does indeed constitute a "valid" global poverty eradication program, it does not in fact constitute a "viable" one. And here is the twist: The difference between "valid" and "viable" is not just semantic or symbolic fluff, but the difference between success and failure. The presently used "so-called" valid formulas have been tried and have failed so often that they have long since passed the point of violating Einstein's maxim of how insanity is defined: "repeatedly trying the same old techniques and expecting a different result."

The reason this formula may be "valid" but not "viable" is that unlike the distribution system that got nine million copies of JK Rowley's book "Harry Potter" into the hand of kids in less than a week, once the boxcars of food are dropped off in some godforsaken Third world desert, there is no well-oiled, well-motivated distribution system available to see that they then get to the needy. Most of those in need have no way of knowing that aid is available, and because of poor infrastructure, could not get to it even if they did.

The incentive under such circumstances is for the lucky handful to use the "the White Man's" largesse either for the benefit of the immediately available and powerful few, or as a basis to begin the process of bureaucratization, which in the end amounts to the same thing. But Easterly knows as well as the rest of us, that even under the best of conditions, and even in the First World, bureaucracies exist only to siphon-off the resources to better perpetuate their own existence, and not to service their client, the poor, or to end poverty.

It is the author's repeated and vivid analogies that drive home all of his key points. For instance, one of the reasons his "motivated middleman strategy" seems to work when bureaucracies do not, is that middlemen "gets paid" only after the end product is delivered to the recipient - whether that product is drugs, prostitution, Harry Potter Books, or poverty eradication. On the other hand, "poverty bureaucrats" (in the U.S. we call them poverty pimps) get paid "up front" for merely showing up on the job. There is no accountability or follow-up or even penalties for undelivered products, and thus they remain unmotivated to get the products out to the recipient. When this disincentive is coupled with local obstacles, such as lack of distribution infrastructure, ignorance or local politics, then it is easy to see why poverty aid has become a magnet for bureaucratic corruption and political machinations rather than for the eradication of poverty.

According to the author, we allow our poverty fighting institutions (from the UN Relief agencies to ad hoc AIDs groups) to get caught-up in this bureaucratic trap by asking the wrong question: "What can foreign aid do for poverty?" -- rather than the proper one: "What can foreign aid do for poor people?" In his most colorful analogy, Easterly compares setting goals and sending money and food before this question is answered to sending a cow to the Kentucky Derby and expecting that by properly training and grooming it, it will compete successfully against thoroughbred racehorses. No matter how well the cow is groomed, trained or how many oats you feed it, the cow has no chance of winning. So too is true for poverty eradication programs that rely only on top-heavy bureaucracies. (Bureaucracies eat oats too, don't they?)

What is the solution to Global Poverty?

Easterly thinks that grandiose goals must first be tapered or given up altogether: Ending global poverty is not going to happen any time soon, if ever. And "having ending it" as an immediate goal is impractical and ultimately self-defeating.

However, if we keep our ears and our aid close to the ground where micro-management is implicit and becomes "built in" rather than explicit, we can make a big dent in poverty by creating opportunities locally where none existed before. When we educate poor kids, especially girls, and otherwise use what people on the ground need and know, we are actually leveraging that knowledge into a force multiplier, that ripples horizontally across the landscapes of the poor, and trickles across rather than telescoping downward as is the case with bureaucratically driven models. In doing so, grassroots approaches have just the opposite effect of getting trapped in cycles of bureaucratic red tape: They tend to maximize the distribution and immediate utilization of scarce resources rather than minimizing and even working against them.

But also implicit philosophy is being "tapped" in Easterly's reasoning. It is the same philosophy that has shown proven results and has been successfully exploited by notables such as the Noble Laureate Muhammad Yunus in his micro-lending programs in Bangladesh. It is a philosophy that is so often ignored that it has become a leitmotif of bureaucratized Aid Relief Programs: People on the ground often know better how they are best to be helped than bureaucrats in capital cities, or those with good intentions writing impersonal checks in far away lands.

What people need is not the equivalent of America's Thanksgiving day handouts of old canned goods, but the dignity and connections that go with being able to create ones own opportunities. It seems that the biblical adage of give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or teach him how to fish and he will feed himself for a life time, works better in the world of global poverty than does Aid bureaucracies.

A valuable addition to the discussions and literature of poverty eradication, and to a potential mid-course correction to those many failing efforts. Five Stars

Want to understand the World?
I highly reccommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the world as it is. Economic, political, and historic factors make the world we live in, with the sharp contrasts inside and inbetween countries. Easterly efficiently describes why such constrasts exist, and what can be done to reduce inequality, at several levels (e.g. national policies, political programs, local development). For anyone interested in social development, or just in knowing why some people don't have food in their tables everyday, three times a day.

Make yourself conscious of the world you live in, and, even better, take action to modify reality.

Easterly's usual rant
The main thing I do share with Easterly is his disdain for the rockers and the dreamers.

However, beyond that, the main theme of this book is a simple tautology--if it works according to whatever criteria he stipulates, it's a "Seeker," if it doesn't, it's a "Planner." And lo and behold, the Planners are the bad boys, because they never succeed. There is nary a recognition of the fact that if you want to "seek" to help the poor somewhere, there are always those pesky governments to deal with. Just one example: he argues that the amounts of money that have been spent on roads in developing countries have ultimately had little impact in many situations, because roads deteriorate. So he recommends that donors need to build maintenance into their programs. Alas, in many parts of the world road maintenance is a job for the local government (which he acknowledges by citing how he deals with a pothole in the States). Now is his recommendation tantamount to suggesting that donors build up local government in developing countries, run by -- what, contractors? Interesting concept.

The basic issue remains: the poor tend to be poor on a large scale largely because they live in countries with bad governments at all levels. The Seekers (sometimes known as do-gooders) can help provide bandaids, but lasting solutions depend on ratcheting up government performance in those countries. How to accomplish that? There are some answers to that, but don't turn to Easterly for guidance.