William Easterly, professor of Economics at NYU, has written a new book challenging the prevailing development orthodoxy of increased aid and the “big push” to combat poverty in the Third World. The White Man’s Burden: Why The West’s efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, published by Penguin is to be released on March 20th.
I have only read a short bit of it so far, but what I have seen is refreshing. He questions the effectiveness of aid, pointing out that aid has been largely ineffective and more of the same is not the answer. In so doing he goes up against politicians such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, economists such as Jeffery Sachs, and rock stars such as Bono and Bob Geldof.
Sachs calls for increased aid and Blair speaks of a “big push” to bring about The End of Poverty. (Sach’s book is also v. interesting by the way) Easterly agrees with Sachs that extreme poverty is a tragedy, but while there is a lot of talk about poverty itself, he says there has been very little said
about the other tragedy of the world’s poor. This is the tragedy in which the West spent 2.3 trillion dollars in foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still has not managed to get twelve cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West has spent 2.3 trillion and still has not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families
He contrasts the central planning inefficiency of the aid industry to the market’s ability to distribute 9 million copies of the sixth volume of Harry Potter books to the British and American economies in a single day.
There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards.
Easterly makes the distinction between what he calls planners and searchers. Planners like Jeffery Sachs and Tony Blair advocate large scale attacks on poverty through aid and global initiatives. Planners operate from top-down schemes that are often well intentioned but have not worked. Searchers on the other hand avoid large scale plans and look for entrepreneurial solutions to solve problems that take into account incentives and accountability.
Despite the evidence, why do big plans remain so popular? Well, one reason of course is that planning schemes are inspiring. End poverty by 2025. Grandiose plans often have the support of big name politicians and celebrities and they promise a solution right away. Piecemeal solutions rarely inspire even when they work. Second, no one is accountable when the fail. And when they do fail the answer is do more of the same thing. The One Campaign is a perfect example. But popularity and good intentions are not a substitute for effectiveness.
A third reason is the prevailing allure of utopian schemes. Easterly writes that the planning approach to foreign aid is part of the what Karl Popper calls the “utopian social engineering” approach to problem. This approach has been tried and failed in diverse times and places such as the five year plans of the Soviet Union, the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank in Africa in the 1980s and 90s, and the “shock therapy” used on the transition economies after years of failed planned economies.
Utopianism is nothing new. Eric Voegelin saw Gnosticism and utopianism as the driving force of modern politics, and it appears to be the driving force of aid as well.
Maybe Easterly’s challenge will wake people up to the failures of planning and get them to respect the entrepreneurial capabilities of the people in the developing world. As Hernando de Soto has pointed out in The Mystery of Capital, there is no lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the Third World.
Instead of increasing aid and more top-down plans decrease regulation and barriers to starting businesses, and let local entrepreneurs and the markets find solutions that far away planners have been unable to accomplish.
