Book Review: "The White Man's Burden"

"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
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 27, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143038826
ISBN-13: 978-0143038825

For Decades, the West (the U.S. and western Europe) has invested billions of dollars in helping the Rest (poor nations in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia). Even though there have been progresses in eradicating diseases and improving lives, people in the Rest still live with less than a dollar a day and still die from easily treated diseases. Jeffrey Sachs is one of the leading figures advocating for a “Big Push” in all areas in order to end poverty. In his 2003’s book “The End of Poverty”, he calls for a Big Push at the global level to end poverty in the world. William Easterly’s “The White man’s Burden” can be considered a reply to Sachs' "The End of Poverty."

Basically, Easterly argues in this book that the West has always felt that it is its duty and mission to “save the Rest.” Going back as far as the 1800s, Easterly compares the vision and writing of authors like Rudyard Kipling to speeches and books written by Gordon Brown, Jeffrey Sachs, or …Bono. For Easterly, “nothing new under the sun.” After the Second World War, “Verbiage about racial superiority, the tutelage of backward peoples, and people not ready to rule themselves went into the wastebasket… ‘Uncivilized’ became ‘underdeveloped’, ‘savage peoples’ became the ‘third world’.” The author argues that there has not been a real change in the way the West has always patronized the Rest. In order to support his argument he analyzes “foreign aid” institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, the USAID, the DFID, the IDB, the AFDB, UNICEF, FAO, UNDP, ILO, etc.

Throughout his book, Easterly makes a distinction between “planners” and “searchers.” As he says, Utopian Planners make great speeches promising great things such as “the end of poverty”, while pragmatic Searchers look for piecemeal solutions. Planners “announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward.” Planners don’t take responsibility for their actions. “Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand.” “Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.” “A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.”

Planners plan from the top, while Searchers work with people at the bottom. Easterly argues that Planners control the foreign aid area: people at the top who think they know what the poor need. Institutions such as the World Bank or the IMF decide everything in Washington and apply their plans across the board without regards to local characteristics and indigenous aspirations.

“Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars a day…Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don’t have enough to eat. Ten million children die every year from easily preventable diseases. AIDS is killing three million people a year….” For decades Planners have developed “Big Plans” to end poverty. Why isn’t it working? Billions of dollars are poured every year in foreign aid, but the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. The problem for Easterly is the lack of accountability and the lack of feedback. Big institutions are not accountable for their failures, and they don’t listen to the poor who is their customer. The author argues that in the private sector when you offer a service or a product and the customer is not satisfied you change your business scheme or your company dies. You are accountable to your customer, and you listen to your customer. That’s not the case in the foreign aid sector.

Exploring the philosophical background of Social Change, William Easterly suggests that the West always chooses the “utopian social engineering” scheme over the piecemeal approach. According to Easterly, “Structural Adjustment Plans” in Africa and post-communist Eastern Europe were Utopia and disasters. Plans developed in Washington were applied in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe without regards to local particularities. Easterly says he is not against foreign aid in Africa. In fact, he supports foreign aid when it does not patronize poor nations, it takes into account their aspirations, it does not try to craft other cultures on the image of the West, and it is accountable for its successes and failures.

What I found so great about this book is how the author went into great detail to support his argument. With an in-depth and overwhelming statistical analysis, Easterly demonstrated that foreign aid, in its current form, does not have any positive effect on economical growth, democracy, and good government. Using data from 1950 to 2001 he illustrated that poor nations with little or no aid had no trouble having positive growth. Instead, Easterly says, “aid financed consumption rather than investment.” Almost all the input used in the foreign aid, from the material to technicians, comes from donor countries. This, of course, increases the recipients’ dependency on foreign help. For example, “In Eastern Europe, chiefs recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West, who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western laws.”

Easterly argues that there are many historical examples of how the West messed up the Rest: the Middle East conflicts, India, Sudan, Nicaragua, Angola (Savimbi), DRC (Mobutu), Haiti, Rwanda.

The future, as Easterly argues, is in “homegrown development.” The author uses history and statistical evidences to demonstrate that nations that had never been colonized by the West, or that had been colonized for a short period of time, have historically succeeded more than the ones that had been colonized or had received heavy IMF and World Bank programs. He uses such examples as China, Japan, Singapore, and Botswana to illustrate that homegrown development is better than Big Plans coming from outside. Easterly suggests to use “a marketplace instead of central planning, a kind of eBay meets foreign aid.” He advocates for social entrepreneurship, decentralization of foreign aid, independent program evaluation and monitoring systems, aid vouchers, feedback from the poor, and piecemeal programs instead of Big Plans.

He says “Big Push”, “Big Plans”, and global blueprints to “end poverty” (advocated by Jeffrey Sachs, Bono, Gordon Brow, the G8, and many others) have never worked for the various reasons he lists in his book; and, they will never work. For Easterly, “The right plan is to have no plan.” The solution is “not to abandon aid to the poor, but to make sure it reaches them.” He concludes by saying that the West should stop thinking that they are the “saviors of the Rest.” The West should stop making Big plans to end poverty and start assisting the Rest on small, concrete, and piecemeal basis.

William Easterly teaches economics at New York University and is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He worked as senior research economist at the World Bank for over sixteen years. He also worked in many countries in Africa, Latin America, and Russia.

I highly recommend this book. It confirmed with scientific evidences what I have always suspected: only homegrown development works. You don’t need to be interested in international development to read this book and maybe…to love it!