ISBN: 1594200378
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Summary: Elusive quest for effective aid
This is, clearly, not the Elusive Quest for Growth, Easterly's previous masterpiece. The tone in Elusive is empathic and more reserved, with explanations that are cool-headed, while The White Man's Burden is angry. It's quite clear that Easterly's is a direct attact on Sachs's "Make Poverty History" campaign. This emotion seems to have affected the quality of writing in some chapters and the overall book.
This, though, doesn't mean that he's wrong or that he makes careless assertions. In fact, the strength of the book is in its humility in recognizing the past's failures, and to learn from them.
Some criticized his caricature of top-down planning, pointing out to areas where planning could be superior to bottom-up searches -- and, in many cases, that is true. But, based on my experience as a policy researcher, more often than not, Easterly's description of the consequences of planning to diluted accountability of the planners ring true more often than not.
The book's most important message, I think, is avoid hubris, create incentives for innovation in the field, and hold those innovators accountable. To me, this seems like a more sensible plan for poverty reduction than to encourage developing governments to produce poverty reduction strategy papers.
Summary: Required Reading for the Gates/Buffet Foundation
I hope the folks at the Gates Foundation have read this book before they embark on spending the $30 billion just donated by Warren Buffet. The charity has to reach grass roots ideas that the disadvantaged can implement on their own and bypass the Warlords and Dictators. Otherwise, we are just lining the pockets of the bad guys- and creating ill will and a culture of dependency in the process. The seemingly intractable problems of the third world will not be solved by more Live Aid concerts but by the intelligent, targeted investment. I want to thank Professor Easterly for advancing this vital discussion.
Summary: Tracking the West's failures of foreign aid
Reviewed by Manfred Wolf, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Review, Sunday, March 19, 2006, pages M1 and M5.
William Easterly puts the failure of foreign aid down to a gigantic act of non-listening, of imposing grand schemes on hapless, desperate countries. Easterly, now a professor of economics at New York University, was for 16 years a senior research economist at the World Bank.
In his latest book, "The White Man's Burden," he sets himself against his former employers, as well as the International Monetary Fund, and by extension against such utopians as the economist Jeffrey Sachs, for being "Planners," who impose grandly conceived solutions that the recipients can't or won't implement and for which the donors are not held accountable. (That the most grandiose form of Planning, large-scale military intervention, is equally futile should not surprise anyone.)
When there are successes, these usually result from limited undertakings. Aid organizations can score with such projects as Food for Education in Bangladesh, a stipend for parents who send their children to school, or the Rural Roads Program in Peru, but these do not flow from grandiose schemes. More commonly, successes in the huge foreign aid programs of the past 50 years derive from "Searchers," people who devise small programs with limited goals -- vaccination schemes or sanitation improvements -- that often originate locally with people searching for remedies. Because the world's poorest
have the least clout, the need for Searchers is all the greater.
To illustrate one such Searcher, Easterly tells the story first related by John Stackhouse in his book "Out of Poverty and Into Something More Comfortable," of a Ugandan chemist, George B. Mpango. To combat undernourishment, Mpango developed a high-protein biscuit -- no thanks to the aid community, which sent instruments to the chemist's lab he didn't ask for and didn't want, "since donors give us what they have, not what we need." Worse still is that aid organizations often reject local initiatives, such as helping to fund a university in Ghana founded by a U.S.-educated entrepreneur. It's almost as if the aid agencies feel they know best, condescension apparently still clinging to these efforts as when Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase that gives this book its title.
The snapshot of the Ugandan chemist is one of many scattered throughout the book, sketches of successes and heartbreaks. Easterly is keenly aware of the tragedy of world poverty and clearly upset by the inability of so many to engage it. Most of the countries that have received huge amounts of foreign aid
are now poorer than ever, though of course AIDS and wars and bad governments have contributed to making them so.
"The White Man's Burden" is almost a reference work of solutions and dilemmas, histories and prospects. Easterly touches on many subjects, ranging from the complexities of aid bureaucracies to the political contradictions of recent Western policies to the relative success of Asian economies in the past few decades. His book is filled with charts and graphs but still written in the same engaging, detail-rich style that characterized his earlier "The Elusive Quest for Growth." Among his many details is the news that sometimes corporations do better than nongovernmental organizations, known as NGOs, or Western government agencies. Thus the Shell Foundation has fought the catastrophe of African indoor smoke by thinking like Searchers and helping to set up small enterprises to produce affordable smoke-reducing stoves that will actually be used by people who need them -- this from a charitable foundation created by Shell Oil.
Not that oil ever appears to be a blessing for an otherwise poor country. Easterly explains that oil revenues ensure that the well-connected and privileged fight harder against redistribution than they otherwise would. One should think there are other reasons as well for the curse of oil, for instance, in oil-rich countries the incentives for economic diversification lessen and poor people inevitably suffer from the presence of vast amounts of money, which their lack of skills keep them from sharing. But it's fascinating to read Easterly make the point that oil revenues and large amounts of for eign aid work about the same way and bring neither democratization nor prosperity.
Equally fascinating -- and downright counterintuitive -- is that poor, developing countries have a better chance at democracy and development than do those
burdened with great natural resources. This, too, points up the need for limited, manageable help. Limited solutions for specific problems are, of course, good and sensible, but Easterly doesn't fully address why, in Africa at least, even those attempts frequently fail: a cultural clash, perhaps, between donors and recipients, with the latter's loyalty often to tribe over community, family over country. Nationhood seems irrelevant. Postcolonial Africa's nations were artificially created and are now forced to live in -- and compete with -- a world of nation-states. They have been dragged into globalized economies where they perform poorly, while some of their people are mesmerized by images of life in Europe and America.
No wonder many of them try to rush the shores of Europe rather than build up their impoverished homelands, a movement of people that Easterly's otherwise excellent book does not take fully into account in its description of what has gone wrong with aid in particular and with relations in general between the West and the rest.
A Manfred Wolf teaches literature and the history of ideas at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco.
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