Great Book | The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So...

Applied Economic Logic for Policy Implementers | The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good | William Easterly

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	• The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good William Easterly Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 61 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Rich People don't necessarily have the answers

According to the way most people think about it, poverty is a problem caused by lack of money. The answer is simple: teach people who are poor how to make money. If they don't have enough money it must be because they're not smart enough to make it, so they need to listen to us while we give them the solution. That isn't a very fair characterisation of foreign aid, but there are often overtones of superiority in the way aid is provided.

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York State University, explains why foreign aid has been so unsuccessful in this book. According to Easterly, there are two types of foreign aid workers: Planners and Searchers. Planners keep coming up with utopian plans which don't work, whereas Searchers keep looking for small ways to make a positive difference. Unfortunately, the aid world is dominated by Planners.

Easterly's views are quite controversial, and they are obviously unpopular with the people who bear the brunt of his criticism. It is very difficult in this argument to know who is right, but judging from the responses of bloggers to his ideas, Easterly's ideas are getting the upper hand. The book is a very entertaining and thought-provoking read, one of the best that I have read this year.

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Great Book

Great book with a lot of good, well cited data. It's a tough read though.

Applied Economic Logic for Policy Implementers

Professor Easterly lays out convincing analysis for the lack of results in areas of foreign aid and development. His synopsis of altruistic planners developing overambitious plans with little historic and cultural knowledge of the people they want to "help" enlightens readers. Easterly proscribes no overarching strategy or plan, rather a new approach to actually having an impact. He proposes that small, targeted piecemeal efforts with accountability have been the only assistance that has made a true impact. His recommendations will be sure to receive resistance in the aid community, as well as by policy makers appealing to US constituencies. However, those who count the unfortunate people in developing countries as their accountable agents will find this book helpful.
Professor Easterly speaks from experience as an economist with the World Bank for over sixteen years. As someone who understands global economic assistance from the inside, his legitimacy carries weight. His humor finds an audience with those of us who have been struggling on the ground trying to enact policies and interventions dreamed up in Washington, New York, London, and elsewhere. The cheeky attitude adds the right touch to the basic economic models and logic referenced within.
This is applied economics at its best. Well worth the read for all policy makers and implementers, whether in government, the military, NGOs or other philanthropists.

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Overly Pessimistic, But A Must-Read

This is a very good book, though it is a little disheartening in places. Where his rival, Jeffrey Sachs, is an idealist, Easterly is a pessimist, and also to an extreme. Overall, though, his book is interesting and insightful, and, in some places, it does show promising potential solutions to poverty. I don't agree with everything Easterly writes, but, if you're interested in development economics or poverty alleviation, this book is absolutely a must-read.

At times overstated, but good anyway

I've never heard of William Easterly before. I'm not really a student of foreign aid or poverty programs in the 3rd world, though I think most everyone agrees something must be done. I picked this book up at a garage sale for a dollar. As a result I wasn't expecting much. Needless to say I think my investment was well made: the book is quite good.

Easterly is an economics professor who teaches at NYU. He's apparently been affiliated with Columbia in the past, and was for awhile at the World Bank. His main topic of discussion here is stated in his subtitle: Why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. His main thesis is built around a division of workers, whether they be aid people or business people, into two groups: Searchers, and Planners. He feels that Searchers will usually be successful, while Planners often fail disastrously. The difference is that when a Searcher fails at something, they return to the drawing board and devise another solution to the problem, persisting until they are successful. Planners make a plan beforehand: anything that doesn't fit into the plan, they ignore, and any failures are due to a lack of money, resources, or cooperation from outsiders. The Plan can never be wrong, and is never modified.

Once he lays out this simple premise (it's a bit oversimplified, but I think valid anyway) Easterly moves on to anecdotes that illustrate how bad things are in the Rest, and why things haven't gotten any better. At times it's a heartbreaking book, with anecdote after anecdote of crushing poverty, disease, war, famine, and apathy on the part of officials or the local government. The author makes no effort to pull his punches (not that he should).

If I have a criticism of the book, it's that his solution to what's going on is relatively amorphous and short. He sees the system as needing systematic reform, top to bottom, but he doesn't think there is a blanket solution to everything. He's probably right, but some concrete alternatives in the narrative itself might have changed the tenor of the book somewhat.

He also occasionally falls into the trap of fitting the facts to his thesis, in various ways. So at one point he wants to argue that those nations that were colonized by the West are worse off than their counterparts which were never colonies. The problem with this thesis is that it's not exactly true. The United States, for instance, was a colony at one time...so were Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I suppose the argument could be that all of these countries are, in some fashion, an extension of Great Britain, but India is a successful country now, and was a colony, in spite of Easterly's thesis. Japan wasn't a colony, and is successful, but then again Ethiopia wasn't a colony either, and is backwards and crushingly poor. Japan's success as a nation, post-World War II, is largely a function of the homogeneity of the country and the unique social personality of Japanese in general, which leads to a groupthink mentality that's much stronger than anywhere else in the world. Easterly also tries to say that middle managers in Japanese industry learned efficiency during the war; anyone who's studies the Japanese war effort knows that their industry was singularly inefficient, and did their war effort almost no good whatsoever. For instance, see R.J. Overy on aircraft production during the war; the Japanese were by far the least efficient.

So what do I think? Easterly does a good job of outlining the problems facing international aid agencies, and the issues that plague them. I think he falls short somewhat in his solutions to the problems involved, but he does try. Overall, this is a well-written, useful book, and one that should be studied by a lot of people involved in international aid.

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From one of the world?s best-known development economists?an excoriating attack on the tragic hubris of the West?s efforts to improve the lot of the so-called developing world

In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man?s Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch?a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West?s economic policies for the world?s poor. Sometimes angry, sometimes irreverent, but always clear-eyed and rigorous, Easterly argues that we in the West need to face our own history of ineptitude and draw the proper conclusions, especially at a time when the question of our ability to transplant Western institutions has become one of the most pressing issues we face.

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