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.