Book Review "The
White Man’s Burden"
Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much
ill and so little good.
By
William Easterly’s
The
subtitle to William Easterly’s new book poses the question: Why have the West’s
efforts to aid the Rest done so much ill and so little good? The book’s primary
answer is that Western interventions in poor countries from World Bank
development projects to military “peace building” operations have been driven
by Planners rather than Searchers. Planners pursue utopian goals, design global
blueprints, and implement them with little local knowledge or feedback from the
intended beneficiaries. Searchers seek first to understand the needs of
intended beneficiaries, and then drawing on detailed local knowledge, as well
as studious trial and error identify practical ways of meeting those needs.
Where Planners dominate, accountability for achieving real benefits is lacking.
Since
World War II, billions have been spent on foreign aid by the western
democracies in attempt to lift the underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia,
Latin America and elsewhere from poverty. Yet, over a billion people continue
to live of extreme poverty. According to World Bank, one in five people subsist
on less than $ 1 per day in the developing countries. Progress has been made
since 1990, but those gains can be attributed to general economic growth and
not foreign aid programs.
Easterly
focuses on planners and searchers. According to Easterly, planners like Jeff
Sachs and government never deal with the people who need the help but instead
with bureaucrats. These bureaucrats often have little incentive to increase the
standard of living of the poor. This is because they might then have to share
their wealth with the poor. Planners don't listen to their beneficiaries and
they don't get in trouble for dreaming up bad projects. Poor people don't have
the means to hold planners accountable for meeting their needs. But, planners
are accountable to people who need to feel like they are doing something good
for the world no matter how ill-conceived. So, we don't treat prostitutes who
are probably the single most important carriers of HIV/AIDS but instead we
treat the afflicted.
On the other hand, searchers the poor, entrepreneurs and western
researchers really care about finding the right answers. After all, the poor
have the biggest incentive of all to find the right answers that they don't
want to be poor. Entrepreneurs have the right incentives, profit. And for some
reason, western researchers also have all the right incentives too. They don't
care about publishing or best seller book. They get close to the people, they
do things on a smaller scale and they use randomized controlled trials to test
their ideas. It doesn't matter that they use the world's poor as guinea pigs
for ideas frequently cooked up in the halls of the elite academic institutions
of the United States. And it doesn't matter that they too are not really
accountable to anyone but themselves.
Easterly
argues that foreign aid is neither necessary nor sufficient to increase living
standards in developing countries. Aid is not necessary because some countries
have been able to raise living standard without a big aid. According to
Easterly, Korea is noticeable example. And it is far from sufficient because many
countries remain in poverty despite receiving substantial foreign aid. Easterly
further argues, “Countries in Africa received more than 15 percent of its
income from foreign donors in 1990 but that surge in aid was not successful in
reversing the slide in growth of income per capita towards zero” (p. 45).
Easterly suggests that, lack of growth in many developing countries is due to
bad government and not due to inadequate foreign aid.
In
Chapters 5 Easterly argues, searchers respect context and empower individuals,
especially through markets. Accountability is at the heart of it: ‘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; to make things
even worse; aid bureaucrats have the incentive to satisfy rich country’s vanity
with promises of transforming the ‘Rest’ rather than simply helping poor
individuals’ (p 146-7).
Easterly
criticises about the Millennium Development Goals as project, about the Big Push
theory, which support the UN Millennium project and African Commission. This is
created outside experts that market functioning is stroke of goods. This also
indicate to failure to deal adequately with ‘gangsters’ with run some
developing countries, and about the ineffectiveness of the international
financial institutions.
Chapter
8 reviews the experience in Africa, Palestine and the Indian sub-continent,
with a number of ice-cream moments, especially about British incompetence and
perfidy. Utopia, as Easterly argues, is making a comeback. Easterly talks about
the better and also says, “If you think I will now offer a utopian blueprint to
fix aid’s complex problems, then I have done a really
bad job in the previous chapters at explaining the problems with utopian
blueprints’ (Pg 321). However, it is indicative that chapter 10 is devoted to
‘home grown’ development with high praise on Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China
and India. When it comes to aid, it turns out that way forward is not to
stop giving it, but rather to make agencies specialise and then use independent
evaluation to hold them accountable. It would also be worth giving vouchers to
individuals that they can redeem for services provided by aid agencies thereby
creating market from bottom up.
Easterly
is not the first to be sceptical about the value of international development
targets as more than mobilising slogans. He is not the first to evince cynicism
about the way in which the idea of participation has been appropriated by
technocrats. He is not the first to question whether poverty reduction strategy papers and the apparatus of spending
frameworks which follow are quite the panacea proponents once believed. He is
certainly not the first to point out that IMF and World Bank conditionality are
ineffective tools. And he is not even the first to observe that donors have
found it difficult to deal with bad governance and corruption. Heavens some
have even dared to challenge Jeff Sachs on Russia, on the Big Push, and, most
recently, on the Millennium Villages Project.
Easterly is indeed excellent on the intellectual dishonesty of
global goals to make HIV/AIDS drugs available to all but he has ignored all the
aspects of opportunity cost and the cost-effectiveness of prevention versus
treatment. Easterly seems not to recognize the importance of
goals for poverty reduction and development work, or the role that goals play
in shaping even his own thinking. His equivalence to markets is faulty. When
Searchers in markets seek merely to maximize their own profits, market forces
reward them for meeting unmet needs, and perform the remarkable function of
allocating the efforts of many individual Searchers across activities in a socially
agreeable way. Unfortunately, as Easterly also points out in another context,
the poor have no money with which to translate their needs into demands. They
generate no market forces to guide Searchers toward meeting their needs.
Easterly
has rightly said that self-important public relations campaigns are not to be encouraged
and that attention should be paid to work which accomplishes concrete tasks
that help people to help themselves. He has further insisted that aid packages
have specific purposes that are immediate, effective and transparent and
involve indigenous populations in the administration of funds. Easterly further
puts targeted projects that “give food supplements to these undernourished
children, or piped water to these villages which lack it, or vaccinate this
population” on the green zone; however, once minimal survival has been assured,
Easterly quickly falls back upon a model of private investment that resembles
the early phases of Western capitalism.
Easterly concludes his book, with some ideas about how Western
assistance can be more incentive compatible and utilise feedback mechanisms for
learning so that progress against extreme poverty in the developing world can
indeed be made. This effort on his part is less persuasive than his dissection
of the problems with the ambitious global plans for poverty alleviation. But it
should also be said that this effort constitutes a very small part of the book,
and his position is stated in a way which is more an invitation to study ways
in which Western assistance could be more incentive compatible and incorporate
local information and critical feedback loops into the process than a claim
that he has in fact found the magic formula.
Easterly,
has talked about Africa, Europe, and most of Asian countries in his book. He
has highlighted the economics of India, China, Bangladesh and a lot of other
countries of Asia, but has failed to talk about Nepal and its conditions
involving foreign aid. All hell seems to have broken loose in Nepal when
foreign aid is taken into consideration. With the percentile amount of foreign
aid going up in Nepal’s budget and the growing level of poverty and its issues,
Easterly has failed to analyse Nepal’s unique case amongst a lot of other cases
that he has argued and put forth.
