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

I picked this up as a follow-up to Easterly's earlier "Elusive Quest for Growth". While the earlier work was a studied examination of the (in)effectiveness of development policies in the developing world, this one is more of a polemic on the idea of development as a means to eliminating poverty. Easterly's approach is more critical than constructive, but is engagingly written and presented. It is, however, only one side of the argument ("academic cat fight" is closer to the mark) over development, charity, investment, and poverty in developing nations. It really is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the field, but should be paired with similar works for a more thorough examination of the topic. Paul Collier's "Bottom Billion" and Jeffrey Sachs' "End of Poverty" present alternative views that are equally worthy of consideration.

In 2011, Eric Ries made a big splash in Silicon Valley with his book “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.” He defines “startup” rather loosely (“an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty”) and encourages organizations of all sizes to avoid creating elaborate business plans and instead work “to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust…” This is almost precisely the same argument made by NYU economist William Easterly in his controversial 2007 bestseller, “The White Man’s Burden: Why West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” which is a direct assault on traditional development economics, the very field he has dedicated his life to. For the past half century, he argues, development economics has been beholden to a “legend”, a legend he once very much believed in: That poverty traps constrain impoverished nations and these poverty traps can be overcome with a “Big Push” – massive Western foreign aid packages and tops-down plans for eradicating poverty, disease, and illiteracy, while promoting various forms of economic growth.

This attempt at a big fix – massive programs of aid with lofty goals but little accountability – has been the world of classically trained development economists, who he derisively dubs “The Planners.” They think they have the answers, he says, and rhetorically they have the advantage because they promise great things, such as “the end of poverty.” Reality, however, is much different according Easterly. There are no easy answers. “The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans,” he says. “The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.” The promises of the Planners, such as his professional rival Jeffrey Sachs, “shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering,” he writes rather caustically. Yet they flourish in a world without feedback or accountability, and where big plans and big promises play well with politicians and celebrities. Nobody (especially those with no direction connection to the problems) wants to promote small but achievable objectives. They want “to do something” – and do it big. Easterly claims that the West, perhaps innocently and unintentionally, has written itself into the hero role in saving the uncivilized world. Indeed, he writes, “…the development expert…is the heir to the missionary and the colonial officer.”

In contrast to the Planners, the author encourages those who want to help to “think small”: the little answers that work and that can make a material, if not revolutionary, difference on the lives of the impoverished. He calls these people, mostly locally-based activists, “The Searchers.” They possess an entrepreneurial and experimentation mindset, and naturally embrace the iterative testing model promoted by Ries in “The Lean Start Up.” They get regular feedback from the poor they serve and are held accountable for their work. They don’t promise to solve world hunger, but they often make incremental yet substantive impact where they work. “The dynamism of the poor at the bottom,” he writes, “has much more potential than plans at the top.”

The book is broken into four parts, each of varying interest and value. The first part, “Why planners cannot bring prosperity” is dedicated to undermining the theory of the “Big Push,” which Easterly writes is demonstrably false. He claims that “Statistically, countries with high aid are no more likely to take off than are those with low aid – contrary to the Big Push idea.” Likewise, attempts to promote free markets from the top down, as is often the case with IMF and World Bank-led structural reforms, ambitious schemes to promote capitalist growth that Easterly admittedly once believed in wholeheartedly, are doomed to failure. The same goes for top down efforts to promote democracy, although he sees democracy as important because it can supply the two things most important for meaningful reform: feedback and accountability.

In Part two, “Acting out the burden,” Easterly accentuates “The tragedy of poverty is that the poorest people in the world have no money or political power to motivate Searchers to address their desperate needs, while the rich can use their money and power through well-developed markets and accountable bureaucracies to address theirs.” He highlights the insanity of the international development industry, which he likes to repeat has pumped $2.3 trillion (yes, “trillion”) into the developing world since the end of World War II – and for what? He says. He cites Tanzania as a typical case study in development economics absurdity, as that country was forced to produce 2,400 reports and host over 1,000 donor visits in a single year. The author hammers home on his two main themes of feedback and accountability, noting what little input the poor actually have on the aid that they receive and that the Planners at the top are usually divorced from reality on the ground. Easterly writes that development aid is a classic “principle/agent” relationship, where the principle is a rich donor country and the agent is the aid agency. The actual target, the poor, are nowhere in the system of response. The principle wants to see big results, and yet is in no position to check on the work and achievements. The agents are thus cloaked in a sort of invisibility – and it’s under this invisibility, the author claims, that the Planners take over. The Planners thrive in the dark, Easterly says; the Searchers in direct light. The Planners benefit from the fact that there are so many aid agencies, all with very similar missions, all supposedly coordinating efforts, yet no single entity is ultimately accountable for achieving results. The smaller and more focused an NGO’s mandate, the better. Or, as Easterly complains, “If the aid business were not so beguiled by utopian visions, it could address a more realistic set of problems for which it had evidence of a workable solution.”

If the aid agencies have failed because their mandates are too broad, what about the IMF, which has the relatively narrow mission of promoting “trade and currency stability”? Easterly argues that the IMF suffers from poor data, a misplaced one-size-fits-all approach, and is all too willing to forgive loans. What should be done? Simple, Easterly says, focus the IMF on emerging markets only and reserve the true bottom billion for aid agencies, thus removing the politically unpopular conditionality that has marked IMF interventions over the past several decades.

Part 3, “The White Man’s Army,” is lengthy and the least insightful in the book. Easterly’s core message, as told through vignettes about Pakistan, the Congo, Sudan, India, and Palestine/Israel is that Western meddling with the Rest has been damaging, whether it was colonialism, de-colonialism or well-intentioned aid intervention. He further argues that US efforts to restructure societies via military force, either directly or through proxies, has all the hallmarks of utopian planner mentality, as suggested by case studies on Nicaragua, Angola and Haiti. In other words, neo-conservatives are the Right wing on “The Planner continuum”, with idealists like Sachs on the Left.

In Part 4, “The Future,” Easterly argues that 60 years of Planners in control of the economic development agenda is enough. It is time to drop the utopian goals of eradicating poverty and transforming governments. “The Big Goals of the Big Plan distract everyone’s attention…” he writes. “The rich-country public has to live with making poor people’s lives better in a few concrete ways that aid agencies can actually achieve.” Even worse, he writes, “The Planners’ response to failure of previous interventions [has been] to do even more intensive and comprehensive interventions.” It is time to empower the Searchers, those who probe and experiment their way to success with modest efforts to make individuals better off, even if only marginally.

As far as the aid agencies are concerned, Easterly recommends: 1) end the system of collective responsibility for multiple goals; 2) and instead encourage individual accountability for individual tasks; 3) promote aid agencies to specialize rather than having many all pursue significant goals; and 4) employ independent auditors of aid activities. The central theme developed by the author throughout this book is that aid agencies need to be constantly experimenting and searching for modest interventions that work. And they must employ more on-the-ground learning with deeply embedded staff. Thus, Easterly encourages the idea of “development vouchers” that would empower local communities to get the aid they most need from the agencies that are most effective. Theoretically, those agencies that either don’t deliver value and/or don’t deliver as promised would be put out of business. It’s a compelling idea that Easterly nevertheless stresses is no panacea.

Easterly writes with a certain punch, which I’m sure ruffled more than a few feathers not only with his arguments but with his style, which can be cynical and snarky. For instance, when looking to catalog the redeeming benefits of U.S. interventions over the past several decades, he cites an “Explosion of Vietnamese restaurants in the United States” for Vietnam, “Black Hawk Down was a great book and movie” for Somalia, and “Salvadoran refugees became cheap housekeepers of desperate housewives” for El Salvador. He goes on to characterize U.S. Angolan ally Jonas Savimbi as “to democracy what Paris Hilton is to chastity.” Amusing commentary, for sure, although perhaps a bit misguided given the gravity of the subject matter.

In closing, Easterly makes a compelling case to “go small” with development efforts and always seek feedback and accountability. He may not be on the Christmas card list of Bono and Angelina Jolie, but I’m afraid he is much more insightful and directionally correct than their hero, Jeffrey Sachs.

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.

I really thought I'd like this book but I think, having worked at the World Bank, he fails to take a critical look at some of their policies. If you want to see the real effect of "foreign aid" take a look at "Life and Debt" the movie or "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man".

He talks of "top down" initiatives not working and he's right, but then takes way too long to make his point and the whole time I read it, I was thinking, "wait, what about what Perkins said about development corporations tricking countries into taking out more loans than they can repay for more infrastructure projects than they need, to grow their incomes less than they need to repay the loans?" and "what about countries like Jamaica that end up worse off because of the "foreign aid" that is tying up all their capital in interest at tremendous rates and killing their growth?" ON paper it looks like there is some growth but it is in the form of sweatshops that bring down the quality of life of the majority, not improvements in the lives of the poor.

It's like he is talking apples and oranges - sometimes he refers to quality of life for the poor but then the "proof" comes in the form of GDP, which could easily reflect only improvements in the richest portion of the country while the poor continue to go under at an ever-increasing rate.

The book is also redundant to a boring degree.

This is surely one of the worst-written and most flawed books I have ever read that was authored by an actual university professor. I have read many books usually labelled as pseudoscience that are much more coherent and make less basic mistakes than this rubbish.

Easterly starts out by repeatetly creating ridiculous analogies, Harry Potter and the Kentucky Derby being his strongest influences. J.K. Rowlings hit is mentioned almost a dozen times in the first 30 pages, pretty surprising for a book that is supposed to be about foreign aid. I am not making this up by the way.

The point Easterly is trying to make throughout the book is the distinction between "Planners" and "Searchers". Examples for the "Planners" are Bob Geldof, Jeffrey Sachs (his favourite target), the IMF and World Bank and other people or institutions that promote foreign aid and/or pass as liberals. "Searchers" are people like Mohammad Yunus of microcredit fame or Dr. Zaf, a Bangladeshi doctor that treated the poor and had the novel and creative idea of charging money for that. I'm not making any of this up. This is the dichotomy that drives the main point for Easterly's argument. He is comparing people planning help to people actually being inside countries and doing the help, and trying to pass it off as some kind of socialism vs capitalism arguing free market would be the best thing.

Hidden between heavily referenced passages, numerous claims are being made without any reference, the worst being on page 41: "in a previous book i gave an example..." without any reference or even title of the previous book in question or the example being given. I am not making this up.

The book reaches a new low point in the chapter "You Can't Plan a Market" with a series of graphs that goes from noninformational to completely incoherent, all while ignoring common rules about tables and graphs. To make his point that IMF and World Bank loans are bad for the economy, he lists the top recepients in Africa in a table. So far so good. The first column is the number (not amount or anything meaningful) of separate loans from the World Bank. The second one (which he inexplicably picks to sort the whole table) is per capita growth, the last one is inflation. None of the other two columns show any correlation to the growth rate, a comparison to countries that received less loans is also not given. The point he is trying to make remains a mystery.

It gets worse however. Graphs become more and more unnecessarily complicated, graphing completely worseless values towards each other. Figure 4: "Growth Trajectory in 1990s of Intensive Structural Adjustement-Lending Ex-Communist Cases" is a high point in incoherence, showing a time line from 1990 to 1999 on the x-axis and "cumulative percentage change in 1990s" as y. What exactly he is trying to graph here again remains a mystery, and the feeling is growing that he is just pulling graphs out of nowhere to say whatever he wants, masking that by being overly complicated.

In the next graph, he graphs a "widely used index" (without reference) called "Latin American Freedom Index". It is apparently so widely used that a quick google search gives me exactly a single search result, the known scam site "docstoc.com". Again, I am not making any of this up. From this nonexistent Index he chooses to present the median on a scale from 4-7 for a index with a 0-10 range, trying to show anything, any graph where a line goes in some direction or bar graphs increase or decrease in size, not making any sense.

Every single graph gets more ridiculous. The next one's y-axis is labeled "Logarithmic scale (each unit increase represents a doubling of per capita income)", and is shown on a scale from 1 to 4, the only section being at 2. Again I feel I should stress that I am not making any of this up. He actually chooses to make a logarithmic scale with no actual values instead of just graphing the actual per capita income, to try to get some kind of graph to back up his argument. Again and again it feels like he thinks his readers will not look at the graphs anyways, skip the hard parts, read the Harry Potter analogies and emerge with reinforced opinions about how good free markets are.

I could go on and on, almost every single paragraph in this book could be picked apart, passages that try to explain complicated things in simple terms by using (mostly wrong) analogies alternate with passages that are intentionally complicated as to mask that they contain no real information.

To sum it up, this book is horribly written to the point of being incoherent at times, misses the point completely and (intentionally?) tries to blind readers with overly complicated and mislabeled graphs that have no meaning.

The depressing fact that the author is a well-renowned economist makes me question that profession once again. Even for "academic" economy literature, this book sets a new low standard. But then again, as Paul Krugman once pointed out - "anyone who has seen how economic statistics are constructed knows that they are really a subgenre of science fiction"

I doubt most people that read this actually tried to follow his argument instead of just reading something in order to reinforce their own opinion and to feel good. I also doubt many people critical of liberal economics theory actually read this, otherwise somebody would have already have picked it apart.

I really can't write a better review than Zach Mulert's "If looking for a piece of strong academic work, look elsewhere!" from July 5, 2012. Like Mr. Mulert, I was compelled to write my first amazon review because of the gulf between this book's rating and it's actual quality.

Dr. Easterly deserves credit for attempting to bring market-driven innovators to the fore of the popular development discussion, dominated by Jeffrey Sachs. He unfortunately failed in this attempt, instead bringing the Sachs-Easterly rivalry to the fore, while somehow managing to be even more sloppy and rambling than Dr. Sachs.

If you are looking for a comprehensive book on the challenges and opportunities of economic development worldwide, see Paul Collier's "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It." It's critical, constructive, and concise.

If you want to understand what sort of actions can and can't improve lives in poor communities, see "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty" by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.

Pity the World Bank economist. First he has to leave the World Bank (whether he leaves on his own account or not is not specified in the book) for saying disturbing things that nobody wants to hear. He then finds asylum at New York University, where he pursues his crusade in favor of rigorous independent evaluations of development programs. He sees his colleague Jeff Sachs from the UN get all the media attention (including the photo ops with Angelina Jolie) for saying precisely the things that he, Bill Easterly, has repeatedly proved wrong (p.50). He finds solace in exposing the contradictions of his fellow World Bank economists who, after stating that giving an estimate of aid needs is pointless, nevertheless pursue to give such estimate (p.182). But he knows deep inside that, whatever bright arguments economists may give, people will always prefer to listen to a badly shaven rock star who declares that "something must be done; anything must be done, whether it works or not" in order to "make poverty history." (p.17)

William Easterly writes an awful lot about himself. Throughout the book, we are introduced to his extended family: his dog Millie (p.225), his three kids (for whom the problem of attribution under asymmetric information can be illustrated by the boy farting in a crowded elevator, see p.172), his frontier ancestor (p.91) who engages a lawsuit against George Washington over a piece of land (guess who wins, albeit three generations later). He sprinkles the chapters with snapshots from his life: growing up in Bowling Green, Ohio, on a diet of Jell-O (p.74); writing his PhD on a NSF scholarship (p.198); driving over bumpy roads from Ghana to Pakistan (p.31); sleeping under a twin blanket with his partner messing with the heating control device (p.168); feeding his kids with a mix of overcooked spaghetti and Chinese deli (p.72); having the city council in Takoma Park, Maryland, fill potholes in front of his porch (p.166), etc, etc.

But The White Man's Burden is by no way autobiographic. In fact, this is a serious essay about the foreign aid system or "why the West's efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good," as the lengthy subtitle indicates. The dirty little secret that Easterly exposes is that rich countries have spent 2.3 trillion dollars over the years to spur development in poor countries, with surprisingly little results to show for.

Meanwhile, every time a person starts paying attention to the issue, he writes a long report that invariably concludes with the need to double the existing amount of foreign aid. So the advisor to John F. Kennedy, Walt Rostow, called for doubling foreign aid back in 1960. World Bank president Robert McNamara also called for doubling it in 1973. The World Bank again called for doubling with the end of the Cold War and the "peace dividend" back in 1990. There was a lot of campaigning last year by people like Jeffrey Sachs, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for doubling foreign aid in 2005 and the G8 actually did agree to double foreign aid to Africa. And even George W. Bush is increasing US aid by 50 percent. Now a fifty percent increase seems to be less ambitious than a doubling of aid; but the White House staff explained to the author that the President thought 50 percent was double. So this actually does fit the picture.

The problem for Easterly is that aid debates are dominated by wishy-washy do-gooders that are not accountable for the promises they make, while the good doers know what works on the ground but cannot make their voices heard. He calls the firsts `Planners' and the second `Searchers'. In his own words:

"In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

Which by the way reminds me of the old limerick:

A planner is a gentle man,
with neither sword nor pistol.
He walks along most daintily,
because his balls are crystal.

Frankly I was disappointed by the book and that is why I give it only three stars. It is a kind of Paradise Lost, a farewell to alms-giving by a former believer who broods over the loss of his illusions but offers very little in terms of workable alternatives. My sincere wish is that he will come over his mourning and start enjoying life again. And my practical advice is that next time he shares a heating blanket with a partner in a cold night, instead of fussing individually with the dual control device, talk to each other and work things out.

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.

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!

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.