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

Preaching to the choir, alas. William Easterly is a Chicago School economist who worked for the World Bank for many years. The theme of The White Man’s Burden is western aid efforts to Africa (and, to a lesser extent, other impoverished areas) are doomed to failure because the aid agencies are going about it in the wrong way. Easterly divides the aid groups into Planners and Searchers – presumably to avoid using “socialists” and “capitalists” but it’s fairly obvious that’s what he means. Planners go for utopian aid schemes, trying to forcibly lift a nation out of poverty; Searchers try to find small scale useful things to do. The basic ideas are:*Aid agencies are not accountable to the people they are supposedly aiding; instead they are accountable to their host bureaucracies. They do not get feedback from the people they are ostensibly helping and they do not try to determine what those people actually need.*Aid agencies favor grand schemes because they are easier to sell to their host bureaucracies, instead of looking for incremental projects; it’s easier to sell a five year plan to dramatically end poverty in Upper Revolta than a project to get new textbooks to Upper Revolta schools.* It’s necessary for poor countries to have good government first, particularly rule of law and property rights. (Easterly notes that “good government” does not necessarily mean “democracy”, citing the example of Singapore, but it’s much more likely to result from democracy). Otherwise aid programs simply transfer money from the middle class in developed nations to kleptocrat dictators in poor nations.* Some Third World countries just need to be abandoned; repeated infusions of aid will just make things worse. Places like Haiti and Angola probably can’t be saved without divine intervention.It might be suspected Easterly is a heartless conservative, nostalgic for the age of colonialism (his choice of a title might seem to suggest that, but it’s actually irony). To the contrary, Easterly has harsh criticism for both colonialism (which he documents as destroying existing government structures in the colonized countries and putting petty despots in power since that made it easier for the colonizers) and “nation building” through military intervention. He doesn’t care much for “peacekeeping” efforts either, pointing out that these are usually attempts to forge some sort of coalition government between rival groups while historically the usual way that situation stabilizes is when one group massively defeats the other(s).Easterly’s description of aid agency procedures remind me a little bit of the Allies in World War One; generals kept saying well, our last offensive was a hopeless failure, let’s try the same thing again and spend even more blood and we’ll break through to the green fields beyond. Similar the attitude of aid agencies seems to be, well, our last attempt was a hopeless failure; let’s try the same again and spend even more money this time and we’ll break through to prosperity beyond. Easterly has particularly harsh words for Jeffrey Sachs; I gather the two have a history in the economics and aid journals. It does seem that Sachs exemplifies the attitude Easterly describes; Sachs’ prescription for ending poverty is doubling foreign aid, and he’s stated that good government will come after poverty is ended, not before.Easterly has numerous graphs and tables illustrating his points; most are as poignant as you can get with lines on paper; the one showing a dramatic inverse relationship between aid to African nations and their per-capita income is particularly grim. Anecdotes and examples are interspersed with the graphics; a particularly depressing example is Easterly’s contrast between how he gets a pothole fixed in the road to his house – he calls his city council representative and complains – versus what happens in Tanzania:*The Tanzanian with the pothole addresses their local “civil society representative”. So far, so good.*Since the Tanzanian government has no money for road repairs, they have to turn to an aid organization. They solicit a “Poverty Reduction Support Credit” from the World Bank (particularly that subunit called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and or a “Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility” from the International Monetary Fund.*In order to get money from either of these agencies, Tanzania has to submit a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PSRP), with input from other donors and creditors, including the United Nations Development Program, The African Development Bank, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, the European Union, the United Nations Children’s Fund, plus other NGOs and national aid agencies from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.*The aid agencies put together a Country Assistance Strategy, which involves a pre-appraisal mission to Tanzania, an appraisal mission to Tanzania, and negotiations and approval by the Board. (This is all done in accordance with the Comprehensive Development Framework, the Operational Directives, Operational Policy, and Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy guidelines and the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative.*The aid agencies and the government of Tanzania conduct a Debt-Sustainability Analysis, a Public Expenditure Review, and implement a Financial Information Management System. The use of the aid money must conform to Millennium Development Goals for poverty, hunger, infant mortality, primary education, clean water, contraceptive use, AIDS, gender equality, and the environment.*If all this works out, money is granted to the Tanzanian government which might then pass some down to the provincial government which might then pass some down to the local government which might use it to fix the pothole.The immense amount of paperwork generated by all this does allow for one growth industry in poor countries: bureaucrats who can write reports and “white papers”. (Although Easterly doesn’t mention it, it also gives those bureaucrats an incentive not to make things work better – they would be out of a job if they did). This segues into another of Easterly’s themes; aid agencies, because they like showy projects for the folks back home, are much more likely to commit money to capital expenses than to repair and maintenance. A ribbon cutting for a new road or the dedication of a new school building will turn up as a picture in the annual reports; however the fact that in a few years the road will be impassible and the school will have no textbooks do not.Easterly does cite cases where foreign aid has worked. These are mostly things that fit his point that aid needs measureable results to be effective; for example, health outcomes. Death provides a good data point. Education is another area where aid agencies have apparently succeeded; school attendance in many of the poor countries has increased (Easterly’s comment about lack of textbooks, though, does make me wonder if the students are actually learning anything).To his credit Easterly does not have a dramatic solution; in fact he comments that if the readers are expecting a dramatic solution they haven’t been paying attention. Interspersed among the graphs and charts are little anecdotes where things have worked, usually by various impoverished Third World residents taking things into their own hands and developing businesses. These are heartening, but they have the problem with all anecdotal evidence; you can’t tell if they are rare exceptions or routine (i.e., are there lots of people that attempted to be entrepreneurs and failed miserably). They do support Easterly’s argument that increment improvements that address actual needs and have measurable results are the only things that will work.Despite the tragic subject matter, Easterly’s style is generally light, often skating on the thin edge of sarcasm. I don’t like the way the book is laid out – a couple of paragraphs of text, then a big font headline for the next section; it’s distracting. Perhaps he thought it would be more accessible to the bureaucrats that need to read it if it were fed to them incrementally. His repeated use of “Planners” and “Searchers” – always capitalized – gets old after a while, too. Worth a read, you’ll be mad at Easterly every once and a while but by and large find yourself agreeing with him.

Easterly explains the problems of international aid in terms of economics. He argues that "planners," experts who tend to make large, unmeasurable goals and all-encompassing programs without accountability for results not only does not lead to "development" of countries receiving aid, but often supports poor governance and at the least is a waste of money. He argues for smaller scale, recipient directed projects with clear accountability. Helped me understand better how poor governance causes underdevelopment. For example, how poor protection of property rights leads to lack of a credit system that might help the poor develop business. The author has a more faith in the absolute good of free markets than I do, but his points are well supported with citations and examples.

This book started out so strong that I was already thinking ahead to giving it 5 stars, and then he started talking about how free markets solve everything, and it went downhill from there. A lot of economists don't seem to understand human nature or human behavior at all. Which makes sense since their economic theories often contradict reality, yet they cling to the theories, insisting they are correct. ('Invisible hand', 'trickle-down' theory, etc.) Centralizing is only good for a few things, not most things. Most things work better when local conditions are understood and dealt with on the spot. It's not surprising, though, that rich people from somewhere else don't want to do the hard work that a local approach needs. Especially because to understand what would work, the rich people would have to stop talking, and start listening. And realize that the answers they want probably won't work (because they won't fit the locale and history and culture). Overall, this book was interesting, and I learned some stuff.

I am a big William Easterly fan and was very much impacted by The White Man's Burden. This book provides an understandable explanation as to why many foreign aid efforts fail while others succeed. His concepts provide insight for anyone interested in effective international humanitarian aid. Regardless of your view of Easterly, he represents one side of the international aid debate, with Jeffery Sachs (author of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals) on the other. There are definite hybrid lines of thinking that integrate theories from both Easterly and Sachs, but if you are looking to learn more about international humanitarian aid, these two guys are the place to start.

Lately, there have been a lot of fancy summits and conferences on AIDS, poverty, globalization, global warming... but it seems like most of those areas are in the midst of crisis rather than in recovery. The summits, the lofty goals, the thousand page manuals don't make people richer and healthier in and of themselves.For generations, now, we westerners have assumed cultural superiority and attempted to impose our values and core institutions in all other parts of the world. Some chunk of that has been well-meaning -- a lot of us are honestly concerned about the health, safety and life expectancy of all global citizens. But even purely altruistic endeavors have failed to make life better for those we're supposedly helping. This has pretty much been completely baffling to me.Reading Jeffrey Sach's The End of Poverty, it seems clear that the problem is just that western countries have been corrupt and lazy in their approach to aid and that if only everyone read the darn book and got excited about it Everything Would Be Fine. By 2015.Easterly paints a much grimmer picture, but it seems a lot closer to my version of reality. He really helped me understand how it is that with billions of dollars spent on aid, conditions continue to worsen for a lot of people. His argument is essentially that failure of aid efforts can be attributed to leadership being far from those they are attempting to assist and looking primarily for politically helpful, high-visibility projects with no accountability to the poor. The aid industry is full of "Planners" who feel they know what's best for everyone and would rather have highly advertised meetings than to get someone to shovel shit out of a Lagos ditch.The great thing about this book is that Easterly lays out a bunch of case studies of things that have worked. There are plenty of examples of "Searchers" who never set out to save the planet but simply worked their darnest to find a localized solution to a localized problem and succeeded. Little things can go a long way, he argues.One of the reasons I love Seattle so much is that there are a lot of Searchers here trying to find ways to improve everyone's lives a little. I'm particularly impressed by the University District Service Provider Alliance (maybe just because I know them best). UDSPA loosely brings together a bunch of organizations providing different services for the homeless population. There's a shelter, there's a clinic, there's a meal program... each institution is highly specialized. The loose grouping brings an incredible amount of value to each individual service because they can easily refer patrons to each other and provide consistent information, staffing, safety... most importantly, I think, they can each focus energy on what they do best knowing that someone else is doing an equally good job in other areas. There's huge value to the Teen Feed program easily being able to alert all other organizations of a violence outbreak. If a shelter volunteer can specifically refer a guest he or she has known for a long time to an acquaintance at the 45th street clinic, the guest can be much more trusting that his/her cocaine habit won't be revealed to the cops as soon as s/he goes in for help regarding an infection of some sort. Since the education access group knows that they can refer people to local shelters and clinics, they don't have to worry about providing basic needs and can instead focus on education.International aid tends to work in a highly centralized fashion. It's not working. Maybe something should change and maybe there's something to learn fro UDSPA's successes.So. A friend told me this was required reading after The End of Poverty. I agree."There is now a regular cycle in the literature on foreign aid and growth. Someone will survey the evidence and find that foreign aid does not produce growth. There will be some to-and-fro in the literature, in the course of which a few studies will find a positive effect of aid on growth. Foreign aid agencies will then seize upon the positive effect, usually focusing on only one study, and will publicize it widely. Researchers will examine the one positive result more carefully and find that it is spurious.""...any government that is powerful enough to protect citizens against predators is also powerful enough to be a predator itself.""Rich-country politicians control the foreign aid agencies. [...] The big problem already noted is that the principal is the rich-country politician and not the real customers, the poor in poor countries. Voters in the rich country and their representatives are the ones who choose the actions of the foreign aid agency. They love the Big Plans, the promises of easy solutions, the utopian dreams, the side benefits for rich-country political or economic interests, all of which hands the aid agency impossible tasks.""The military is even more insulated from the interests of the poor than aid agencies are. People don't give reliable feedback at gunpoint. Invading soldiers and covert destabilization are not great ways to ascertain local peoples' interests. The poor on the receiving end have few votes on whether they want the Americans to save them.""Nor is self-reliance a magical panacea for poor people -- many unlucky poor people, no matter how hardworking, live in states run by gangsters or simply in complex societies that have not yet discovered the elusive path to development. Western assistance, suitably humbled and chastened by the experience of the past, can still play some role in alleviating the sufferings of the poor."

Argues that the aid world needs more 'Searchers' rather than 'Plannners.' There are a couple of chapters on colonialism and military intervention where he wanders beyond his expertise but overall a good book. A particularly passionate attack on AIDS treatment programs for not being the most cost-effective health programs out there.