White Man's Burden

Roger Bate reviews Bill Easterly's new book, White Man's Burden, which explains why foreign aid has failed so miserably over the years.  Easterly was a classmate of mine in graduate school at M.I.T.

Here is a sample of Bate's review:

Foreign-aid is driven by "Planners" says Easterly. Perhaps the most famous planner and a determined opponent of Easterly is Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and the United Nations. Planners think of development as a technical problem that can be overcome by ambitious, multi-faceted, centrally-controlled campaigns, backed up by oodles of cash. Unfortunately, planning lacks market feedback mechanisms, so cannot measure useful performance indicators. Plus, Planners are rarely held accountable for their myriad failures.

Easterly masterfully destroys the key arguments, or "legends," of the Planners -- one being that we must give money to the poorest to get them out of the poverty trap, another that aid will lead to growth.

Comments

[Mike Huben]

If you want a stupid, ideological, unnuanced review, be sure to go to Tech Central Station.

If you want a more balanced evaluation, try this one from Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in Foreign Affairs.

Sen likes some of what he sees, but he spanks Easterly severely: "Unfortunately, Easterly gets swept up by the intoxicating power of purple prose (I could not avoid recollecting Kipling's description of words as "the most powerful drug used by mankind"). He forgoes the opportunity for a much-needed dialogue, opting instead for a rhetorical drubbing of those whom he sees as well-intentioned enemies of the poor."

Nor does Easterly take a one-sided libertarian view, as Sen points out. "Market ideologues may love the battering that large-scale state intervention receives through Easterly's hard-hitting prose. But they will be less happy with his carefully spelled-out skepticism of schemes for the immediate replacement of all economic institutions with a pure market system."