The White Man’s Burden (William Easterly)

In 2004, a group of schoolteachers in Coimbatore, India noticed that girls where dropping out of school around the age of puberty, and thought they knew why. Using the website Globalgiving.com, a sort of eBay for charitable donations, they posted the following advert: "New toilet block for school. $5000." Within a few weeks individual donors from around the world had raised the money, 3 months later the block was built, and within 2 years over 100 school girls had stayed in education. The teachers had correctly guessed that these dropouts were a result of embarrassment due to girls starting menstruation and having no separate facilities from the boys.

The World Bank, together with a Canadian development agency launched a project in Lesotho in Southern Africa to help farmers gain access to markets and develop modern techniques of crop production and livestock management. The aim was to increase crop production by 300%, to increase the size and quantity of livestock by separating grazing areas, and to build roads to the mountainous region, increasing trade. Local laws and tradition gave no right to outsiders to separate grazing areas, crop output fell, and the road allowed for cheap grain to come into the area, putting farmers out of business. The project managers complained that locals were "defeatist" and "didn't think of themselves as farmers". The reason for this, the locals replied, was that they were not farmers, but migrant workers from South African mines.

William Easterly, a former World Bank Economist has written 3 books about the developing world and it's interaction with foreign aid agencies. The first, The Elusive Quest For Growth combined a history of economic theory with an outline of the singular failure of western nations and agencies in achieving growth elsewhere. The theme of that book was Incentives Matter. In The White Man's Burden, Easterly's mantra is to divide the world into Searchers and Planners. The School teachers in India were searchers, solving small but important problems as they found them, whilst the Canadians were planners. The problem, contends Easterly, is that the vast amount of foreign aid is controlled by planners who arrive in new lands lacking local knowledge, with little accountability, and with utopian plans.

Easterly points out that despite $2.3 trillion dollars spent on foreign aid by 2005, we had still not managed to get 12 cent anti-malaria drugs to children that could prevent half of all malaria deaths. Meanwhile, on one day in 2016 British and American economies managed to deliver 9 million copies of the new Harry Potter book to fans, despite no agencies, no Marshall Plan and no government coordination. This book is not an ideological pro-free market treatise aimed at denigrating do-gooders in the west, but a practical examination of why we have managed to spend so much money so ineffectively. Whilst it is perhaps not as original as Easterly's two other books, The White Man's Burden is nevertheless indispensable to those interested in helping the world's poor.

The White Man's Burden argues as follows: to end poverty nations need economic growth, but empirically aid does not lead to growth. Free markets and democracy combined do lead to growth, but imposing free markets and (especially) democracy from outside rarely works, and usually has dire unexpected consequences. The effectiveness of any type of aid is dependent on local conditions, which foreigners rarely understand well enough; measurements of success are rarely set by those receiving the aid.

If markets work on incentives, what are the incentives of foreign aid agencies? Because they answer to either bureaucrats or donors in the west, priorities are out of kilter with the people they are supposed to be helping. So roads are built and are reported to have been built (for which we pat ourselves on the back), but no funding is set aside for maintenance, rendering them unusable. Educational investment is measured by 'how many new schools were built', leading to much higher investment in buildings than books, which yield 14-times greater benefit to students.

Nowhere is the mismatch between grandiose plans of western utopian planners and local needs more apparent than in the western response to the Aids crisis in Africa. Because of the emotional potency the west attaches to treating those with Aids, the vast majority of funds are assigned to treatment rather than prevention. Keeping someone with Aids or HIV in Africa alive for another year costs $1500 (assuming retroviral drugs are taken correctly - if not the disease builds up resistance), while studies showed that to prevent other fatal diseases costs between $1-$20 per year of life saved, and $20-$400 for each new HIV infection averted. Health experts wrote in 2003 that 5.5 million child deaths could have been avoided had expensive intervention in Aids treatment not cannibalised aid dollars. What would Africans themselves have chosen to spend that money on, Easterly asks?

It may seem surprising that, given the author's positive stance towards free markets, he is so critical of the IMF and World Bank, who so famously impose 'free market reforms' on nations as conditions for their loans. This stems from his contention that free markets cannot be imposed from the outside. When the Berlin Wall fell, he was still an employee of the World Bank, and admits to his being in favour of the 'shock therapy' doctrine of privatisation and widespread imposition of free markets into the Russian economy. The abject failure of these reforms, which led to mass corruption, the new formation of oligarchy and ultimately economic stagnation can be contrasted with the explosion of growth in China. In 1978, in the tiny village of Xiaogang, 20 starving families held a secret meeting. Rice production in the communes was too low to sustain them, and so they divided up the land, and allowed each person to keep what they grew - leading to an explosion of output. As word spread, other villages followed suit, and by 1982, the policy was ratified by the National Communist Party; by 1984 there were no communes left. This is a perfect example of the theme of this book - bottom up, trial and error processes by those who are effected by the outcome beat grand plans every time.

There is much more in the book to make the reader angry - Aids spending conditional on teaching abstinence instead of distributing condoms under pressure from the U.S. Christian lobby (and the Vatican), the IMF and World Bank making loans exclusively to governments (even when such governments are corrupt or worse, warlords), before even mentioning the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy by way of invasion. But Easterly cautions against such anger, if it leads to demanding a singular fix. The real message of this book is that there are no easy answers, and there are no outright fixes to the world's problems. If we are to improve the lives of the millions still in poverty it must be done in a piecemeal fashion, with direction from below not above, and with full knowledge that outright victory is a laudable but ultimately impossible aim.