The Anti-Sachs
Just finished Will Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good.
I read Lamont Library’s copy, so I had the benefit of someone’s crabbed marginalia. Among the more illuminating pencilings: “the worst neo-lib crap available on the free market” (on the title page), “so McDonald would be the big push? what a crap theory!” (below a section contrasting aid-planners’ inflexibility to Ray Kroc’s leap from selling mixers to running restaurants). This petered out after the first chapter — I suppose he or she dumped the book in disgust.
The central argument is that developing-country problems can be better solved with tweezers than with sledgehammers. In other words, aid-givers with narrow, well-defined goals and clear measures of success are more likely to do good than those with open-ended goals and hundreds of objectives, even if they have (as they often do) colossal budgets. Easterly calls the former “searchers” and the latter “planners” or “big push” projects, but he might as well call them “Smile Train” (insert any narrowly-targeted charity here) and “Jeffrey Sachs”. Unfortunately for the world’s poor, students of the Sachs school include Western governments, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, big-name philanthropists, and Bono.
I’m occasionally a bystander to international-development chatter, so Easterly’s nonstop tweaks at ID bureaucratese were a nice touch. He devotes the middle of one chapter to such succinctly-titled entities as “The Open-Ended Ad-Hoc Working Group on Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Outcomes of the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields”. Near the end, he finds a report by the “Joint Venture on Managing for Development Results for the DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness and Donor Practices” called “Managing for Development Results, Principles in Action: Sourcebook on Emerging Good Practice.” One Scalian section lists reports produced by aid agencies:
“…besides the UN’s 3,751-page Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, we have the British government’s 453 page Our Common Future: Report of the Commission for Africa, plus the latest update of the IMF and the World Bank’s 1,246 page PSRP Sourcebook…”
For this world in which Bangladeshi children die of diarrhea while Big Aid keeps International Paper in business, Easterly blames misaligned incentives. Western aid agencies are not actually rewarded for achieving their goals, only for setting them. Mere expenditures are often used as a measure of success. Easterly’s reductio ad absurdam: would those who paid $10 to see the 2005 flop Catwoman be mollified in knowing that the producers dumped $100 million into the film? (The Catwoman analogy appeared in his 2005 Foreign Policy article – I guess it was too good not to reprint.) Today, the ONE Campaign advocates pushing 1% of the U.S. federal budget into foreign aid – on top of the $2,300,000,000,000 that the West spent on foreign aid over the last 50 years.
Perhaps to avoid the “neocon toady” slur, the second part of the book heaps scorn on the American nation-builders in Iraq in 2003 (and Afghanistan in 2001 and El Salvador in the 1980s and Vietnam in 1961 and Guatemala in 1954 and so on). As an economist, he proclaims himself unqualified to judge the national security benefits of each of these interventions, but finds that they did little economic good (besides spurring an “explosion of Vietnamese restaurants” and Guatemalan handicraft shops in the U.S.). He’s a fan of markets, but not of recent efforts to create them. On post-communist Eastern Europe, he explains that the “chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms,” to whom fell the task of writing new laws.
AIDS activists also get their sacred cow gored: Easterly asserts that campaigns to bring (expensive) AIDS drugs to the poorest parts of the world are wasting money better spent on (cheap) prevention. One of his more macabre observations: spending money on AIDS treatment rather than prevention actually makes the AIDS crisis worse, because treated people live longer and can spread the disease further. Easterly blames anti-condom conservatives in the U.S. and AIDS activists who found an easy target in Big Pharma.
His success stories are narrowly targeted and often home-grown — private colleges launched by Indians and Ghanaians, a Unilever-sponsored handwashing campaign to fight diarrhea in India, entrepreneurs selling anti-malarial bed nets in Malawi (free nets tended to end up as fishing equipment). His parting shot calls for more of those narrowly-focused campaigns, a willingness of aid donors to forget about self-sufficiency (in other words, abandon the tired story about teaching men to fish and just feed the starving kids), and more independent evaluation of the outcomes of aid projects. He calls this, in not so many words, a scientific approach to aid. You’d think that this would be obvious, but then again, I was floored a few years ago when I started hanging out at Harvard Med and found out that something called “evidence-based medicine” was the the next big thing. (What on earth were doctors practicing before?)
The book is a few dozen pages too long, most of which are taken up by tedious and unnecessary examples of capitalism at work, many of which somehow manage to involve his children. The central dichotomy between “searchers” and “planners” makes the latter out to be so outrageously wrong that one might accuse Easterly of setting up a strawman. Since he takes on the entire 20th century’s worth of Western foreign aid and humanitarian military intervention, he could easily be accused of cherry-picking the worst examples of big-push aid to bulk up the scarecrow. But neither of these detract much from the book. Highly recommended, particularly if you can get a copy after a starry-eyed development groupie had a go at it.
P.S. Someone deserves an award for Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature. Have you ever wasted ten minutes looking for a passage that you know was there somewhere, should have bookmarked, but didn’t? I rarely have to do that anymore.