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Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
Penguin
March 2006
On Sale: March 16, 2006
448 pages
ISBN: 1594200378
EAN: 9781594200373
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political | Non-Fiction
An informed and excoriating attack on the tragic waste,
futility, and hubris of the West's efforts to date to
improve the lot of the so-called developing world, with
constructive suggestions on how to move forward. William Easterly's The White Man's Burden is about what
its author calls the twin tragedies of global poverty. The
first, of course, is that so many are seemingly fated to
live horribly stunted, miserable lives and die such early
deaths. The second is that after fifty years and more than
$2.3 trillion in aid from the West to address the first
tragedy, it has shockingly little to show for it. We'll
never solve the first tragedy, Easterly argues, unless we
figure out the second. The ironies are many: We preach a gospel of freedom and
individual accountability, yet we intrude in the inner
workings of other countries through bloated aid
bureaucracies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and World Bank that are accountable to no one for the
effects of their prescriptions. We take credit for the
economic success stories of the last fifty years, like
South Korea and Taiwan, when in fact we deserve very
little. However, we reject all accountability for pouring
more than half a trillion dollars into Africa and other
regions and trying one "big new idea" after another, to no
avail. Most of the places in which we've meddled are in
fact no better off or are even worse off than they were
before. Could it be that we don't know as much as we think
we do about the magic spells that will open the door to
the road to wealth? Absolutely, William Easterly thunders in this angry,
irreverent, and important book. He contrasts two
approaches: (1) the ineffective planners' approach to
development-never able to marshal enough knowledge or
motivation to get the overambitious plans implemented to
attain the plan's arbitrary targets and (2) a more
constructive searchers' approach-always on the lookout for
piecemeal improvements to poor peoples' well-being, with a
system to get more aid resources to those who find things
that work. Once we shift power and money from planners to
searchers, there's much we can do that's focused and
pragmatic to improve the lot of millions, such as public
health, sanitation, education, roads, and nutrition
initiatives. We need to face our own history of ineptitude
and learn our lessons, especially at a time when the
question of our ability to "build democracy," to
transplant the institutions of our civil society into
foreign soil so that they take root, has become one of the
most pressing we face.
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