William Easterly is a professor of Economics and a former economist at the World Bank. In his book “The White Man’s Burden,” Easterly tackles the ambitious plans of economists throughout the modern age to try to address the question of underdevelopment and why those efforts have gone repeatedly wrong. Easterly’s message is straightforward and he stresses his main point through varied illustrations. The book develops the argument beyond incentives and stresses that information is necessary as well. He divides the public policy discourse into two camps – the “searchers” and the “planners” – and he shows the relevant merits of the searches in eradicating social ills and the futility of planners to achieve their ambitious goals. Evidence in the book is drawn from not only the plight of underdeveloped countries in Africa, but also the efforts to build a market society in East and Central Europe since 1989.
In this book, the reader learns why you cannot plan a market economy, how it is that planners and gangsters come to be aligned, and why top-down approaches to development generate unintended and undesirable consequences, while bottom-up and indigenous processes of development actually work to raise the standard of living for the least advantaged in any society. Recent success stories, the book emphasizes, are countries that did not get a lot of foreign aid and did not spend a lot of time in IMF programs. The success is not due to global plans to end poverty, but due to homegrown efforts to align incentives, utilize local information and learn through market experimentation the best way to realize the gains from trade among the people.
In “The White Man’s Burden,” Easterly turns from incentives to the subtler problems of knowledge. He says that if the West wants to help the poor, rather than just congratulate themselves for their ‘generosity’, they have to give up their grand ambitions for wholesome solutions, and instead concentrate on piecemeal problem-solving which has the best chance of success.
He contrasts the traditional ‘planner’ approach of most aid projects with the ‘searcher’ approach that works so well in the markets and democracies of the West. Searchers treat problem-solving as an incremental discovery process, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works. Easterly observes in his book that ‘a planner thinks he already knows the answers,’ whereas ‘a searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance and he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors.’ Planners trust outside experts. Searchers emphasize homegrown solutions.
In “The White Man’s Burden,” Easterly argues again and again that local details matter, He gave an illustrative example of a project to teach agricultural techniques to farmers in Lesotho, sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank, which was a complete flop. He (Easterly) observes that the project was doomed to fail from the onset due to ill-knowledge and the ‘planner’ complex. The range-management techniques conflicted with local law, which guaranteed open grazing, and the farming plans were doomed by the region’s bad weather.
In fact, the locals already knew the area wasn’t good for farming. Yet the project managers complained that the local people were ‘defeatist’ and didn’t ‘think of themselves as farmers.’ Instead of taking the critical thinking by the project managers who employed a ‘know-it-all’ attitude, Easterly correctly observed that ‘perhaps the locals didn’t consider themselves farmers because they were actually not farmers, but rather they were migrant workers in South African mines.’
Failure is, of course, part of trial-and-error learning. The problem is that aid programs rarely get enough feedback to facilitate the ‘learning’ part, whether from competition or complaint. Instead, as Easterly notes, advocates tend to measure success by how much money rich countries spend, adding that praising the G-8 industrialized nations for doubling the amount of aid they give to Africa, is like reviewing Hollywood films based on how big their budgets are. Easterly acknowledges that not all foreign aid has failed. In public health and school attendance, where results are relatively easy to measure, focused efforts have made a huge difference. He argues that the easier it is to see whether aid is working, the more likely it is to succeed.
Easterly attempts something harder by trying to suggest a more promising approach. Unfortunately, his alternative is still underdeveloped, devolving at times into slogans. After all, ‘searchers’ also do plan, but the question is not whether to plan, but rather who makes the plans, how they are changed and where feedback comes from. In “The White Man’s Burden”, Easterly underplays the essential role of competition, not only in markets but between political jurisdictions.
This book (“The White Man’s Burden”) demonstrate that Easterly is better at documenting the failures of ‘planners’ than analyzing the successes of ‘searchers’. He examines the problems of post-Soviet Russia but offers nothing about why countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Estonia have successfully made the transition to capitalism and democracy. Nowhere does he discuss whether the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose funding comes from one of the world’s most effective Searchers, is any more effective than traditional agencies.
Easterly is understandably skittish about generalizations, but extracting lessons from experience is quite compatible with decentralized searching. Businesses in radically different industries learn from one another. Searching includes discovering the day’s best practices, since not every situation is unique. Still, “The White Man’s Burden” is an important book. Easterly asks the right questions, combining compassion with clear-eyed empiricism. All pro-development campaigners like Bono and others should heed what he has to say in his books.
In this vein, Easterly concludes his book with some ideas about how Western assistance can be more incentive compatible and utilize feedback mechanisms for learning so that progress against extreme poverty in the developing world can indeed be made. This effort on his part is less persuasive than his dissection of the problems with the ambitious global plans for poverty alleviation. But it should also be noted that this effort constitutes a very small part of the book, and his position is stated in a way which is more an invitation to study ways in which Western assistance could be more incentive compatible and incorporate local information and critical feedback loops into the process than a claim that he has in fact found the magic formula.
References
Alesina, A. & Weder, B. (2002). Do Corrupt Governments Receive
Less Foreign Aid?, American Economic Review 92(8)1126–37.
Boettke, P. (2006). Book Review of William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden,” George Mason University.
Djankov, S., Montalvo, J.G. & Marta Reynal-Querol, M. (2005). The Curse of Aid, World Bank mimeograph.
Easterly, W. & Levine, R. (2003). Tropics, Germs, and Crops: The Role of Endowments in Economic Development, Journal of Monetary Economics 50(1).
Knack, S. (2004). Aid Dependence and the Quality of Governance: Cross-Country Empirical Tests, Southern Economic Journal 68(2) 310-29.
OECD. (2001). Poor Performers: Basic Approaches for Supporting Development in Difficult Partnerships, Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Van de Walle, N. (2005). Overcoming Stagnation in Aid-Dependent Countries, Center for Global Development: Washington, D.C., p. 67.
Postrel, V. (19th March 2006). The poverty puzzle, New York Times Newspaper. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/the-poverty-puzzle.html