| Book by Category | |  | E-Commerce | Home » » » The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good | | | | | | | Description: | | 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. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| William Easterly | | Hardcover:
| 448 pages | | Publisher:
| Penguin Press HC, The | | Publication Date:
| March 16, 2006 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1594200378 | | Package Length:
| 9.4 inches | | Package Width:
| 6.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.55 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 63 reviews |
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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Essential reading for everyone working in international developmentDec 29, 2009
The New York University professor and former World Bank economist, Bill Easterly, provides a scathing critique of the grand plans to transform entire Third World societies through development aid, as promoted by academic and other luminaries such as Jeffrey Sachs and Bono, as well as by many bilateral and multilateral development agencies. Building on a thorough historical analysis and deep understanding of how the development business works, Easterly convincingly argues that such utopian plans have never worked--despite all the billions of dollars put into development aid, poverty is still rampant and many countries (especially in Africa) remain destitute and the Millennium Development Goals remain elusive. He divides the people and organizations working in development into `Planners' who promote a vision of instant and complete transformations through a big bang; and `Searchers' who seek solutions to concrete problems that actually can be solved.
Unlike Dambisa Moyo, whose much less sophisticated book `Dead Aid' received wide attention for her extreme views, William Easterly does not condemn development aid as the cause of all evil in the poor countries. He sees a role for development aid, but is concerned about its effectiveness (or rather the lack of it). He advocates for focused aid that addresses concrete development problems facing the poor, such as health, education, roads or water. He also calls for innovative ways of approaching development, especially at the local level, arguing that local people know their own problems better than planners in some faraway capital (one of the last chapters is called `Your Ideas Are Crazy, but Are They Crazy Enough?'). One of the problems is that official development aid always goes through the government, no matter how inefficient or corrupt it is, with the result that the poor people who are intended to benefit from the aid never see any of it.
A Leitmotif in the book is accountability towards the intended beneficiaries, giving them what they want and need--and making sure that it is delivered to them. Therefore, he sees independent evaluation of aid programs as one of the most crucial solutions to ensure that aid is effective in helping those it is intended to help.
The book is written in a very lively manner drawing directly from the decades of experience in Africa, Asia and Latin America that Easterly has. He gives credit where credit is due, but does not spare anyone--left or right--from a piercing look into the motivations and results of their actions. His prose is at times outraged and irreverent, often laced with humour, always well argued. Everyone working in international development should read the White Man's Burden.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Tells it like it isDec 21, 2009
William Easterly doesn't pull any punches in this well-written book, and perhaps that's why it has been so polarizing. Of course, the aid community doesn't like reading about their failures, and so I understand why many of them have given this book unfairly low reviews. However, unless we can actually face our shortcomings we will never learn from them, and this book is spot-on when it comes to identifying shortcomings in the way donor money is so often wasted needlessly by those in the aid community Easterly calls the "Planners."
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Rich People don't necessarily have the answersDec 09, 2009
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.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
At times overstated, but good anywayNov 30, 2009
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.
Great BookOct 03, 2009
Great book with a lot of good, well cited data. It's a tough read though.
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