The White Man's Burden (book)

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good () is a 2006 book by American economist William Easterly, a former senior research economist at the World Bank and professor of economics at New York University. The book is a critique of Western development aid and of large-scale, top-down plans to end global poverty. Its title is an ironic reference to Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden", which Easterly uses to characterize the paternalistic assumption that rich countries can and should design the transformation of poor ones. The book won the Manhattan Institute's inaugural Hayek Prize in 2008.

The book was written in large part as a response to Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty (2005) and to the 2005 campaigns for increased aid associated with the Millennium Development Goals and Live 8.

Background

Easterly's earlier book, The Elusive Quest for Growth (2001), had argued that a series of development panaceas failed because they ignored the incentives facing governments, aid agencies and poor people themselves. The White Man's Burden extends that argument from growth policy to the institutions and practices of foreign aid.

The book also continued a public exchange between Easterly and Sachs. Easterly had reviewed The End of Poverty critically in The Washington Post in 2005 and in the Journal of Economic Literature ("The Big Push Déjà Vu", 2006); Sachs replied that the review was a polemic that misrepresented his proposals.

Summary

Easterly frames global poverty as two "twin tragedies": the first is that hundreds of millions of people live in extreme poverty and die prematurely; the second is that, after roughly fifty years and some $2.3

    trillion in Western aid, there is comparatively little to show for the spending. He illustrates the second tragedy by contrasting the failure to deliver inexpensive interventions, such as cheap antimalarial medicines and bed nets with the efficiency with which private markets deliver consumer goods in rich countries.

Planners and Searchers

The book's central analytical device is a distinction between two types of actors in development. Planners set large, externally defined goals (such as the Millennium Development Goals or the elimination of world poverty), assume they know the answers in advance, and lack both feedback from the intended beneficiaries and accountability for results. Searchers work at small scale, seek out what is actually in demand, adapt to local conditions, test whether their interventions work, and are held accountable when they fail. Easterly argues that markets and democratic politics supply such feedback and accountability in rich countries, whereas the aid system, in which the funders (Western taxpayers and governments) are not the intended customers (the poor), largely lacks it. An aid agency, he contends, can fail to deliver services for decades without losing its budget or mandate.

Critique of the "Big Push"

Easterly challenges the idea, revived by Sachs, that poor countries are caught in a poverty trap from which only a coordinated "Big Push" of aid-financed investment can release them. He traces the idea to development theory of the 1940s and 1950s and argues that the empirical record does not show that initially poor countries grow more slowly once the quality of government is taken into account; on his account, bad governance rather than a lack of capital is the binding constraint. He also reviews cross-country evidence on aid and growth, conceding that the literature is contested while arguing it gives little support to large aid increases.

Institutions, markets and the IMF

A recurring theme is that functioning markets and institutions, property rights, contract enforcement, social trust, and protection from corruption and extortion, evolve from the bottom up and cannot be designed or imposed from outside. Easterly criticizes the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for repeated structural-adjustment lending to the same countries, for imposing "shock therapy" reforms, and for attempting to engineer institutional change through conditionality.

Health aid

Easterly does not argue that all aid has failed. He identifies successes, particularly in public health, such as vaccination campaigns and other targeted interventions with measurable outcomes, as examples of what aid can achieve when goals are specific and results observable, and contrasts these with less successful efforts, including aspects of the international response to HIV/AIDS.

Military intervention and "postmodern imperialism"

A later section of the book links contemporary aid and state-building to the history of colonialism. Easterly criticizes Western military interventions and nation-building projects, as well as proposals by some commentators for a renewed, benevolent form of imperial administration of failed states, arguing that outsiders lack the knowledge and accountability to remake other societies.

Recommendations

Easterly concludes that donors should abandon utopian goals and instead finance "piecemeal", small-scale interventions; evaluate them independently and rigorously; reward agencies and individuals according to measurable results; and give poor people more voice in what is provided, for example through vouchers. He argues that successful development is overwhelmingly "homegrown" and that the West's appropriate role is a modest one.

Reception

The book was widely reviewed and became a central text in the debate over aid effectiveness of the mid-2000s, frequently paired with The End of Poverty as representing opposing poles of that debate.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, reviewing the book in Foreign Affairs, found "much of merit in Easterly's perceptive vision about initiatives, incentives, and communication" and praised its documentation. He objected, however, that Easterly's rejection of planning was too sweeping, that the Planner–Searcher dichotomy obscured important distinctions between different kinds of problems and collective action, and that Easterly gave aid institutions too little credit for already recognizing many of his points.

Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book in The Lancet, defending the need for strategic, scaled-up investment in health, agriculture and infrastructure against what he characterized as an inadequate piecemeal approach. Easterly replied in the same journal, arguing that Sachs treated poverty as a problem already solved by natural science that merely needed to be applied at scale, whereas the book located the failures in economics and governance.

Joshua Kurlantzick, writing in Commentary, judged the book's attack on the international anti-poverty establishment difficult to refute, while noting that many of its targets, such as United Nations summitry, were easy ones. In the Journal of International Economic Law, Tomer Broude described the core argument as straightforward and legitimate but argued that it was weakened by unsophisticated historical and political claims, including those surrounding the book's imperial framing.

In 2008 the book received the first Hayek Prize, awarded by the Manhattan Institute to a recent book reflecting Friedrich Hayek's vision of economic and individual liberty.

See also

• The End of Poverty
• Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo
• The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier
• Aid effectiveness
• Development economics
• Criticism of foreign aid

External links

• "The Man Without a Plan", review by Amartya Sen, Foreign Affairs
• The White Man's Burden at the Internet Archive