Book Review

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William Easterly's The White Man's Burden

byTari Owi

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. William Easterly, Penguin Press, 2006, 417 pp. $27.95

The debate surrounding foreign aid efforts is often predictable and circular. How can the United States help to eradicate AIDS in Africa? What amount of funding is necessary for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank to stabilize the Mexican economy? Will the Iraqi government develop into a functioning democracy before the withdrawal of foreign armies?

These questions don't find answers in William Easterly's The White Man's Burden, the New York University development economist's latest contribution to the debate over foreign aid. Instead of attempting to ignite a new movement to eliminate poverty worldwide or to teach every Cambodian sex worker with AIDS how to be the next Bill Gates, Easterly, a former senior adviser at the World Bank, advocates a significantly less complex agenda: "have no plan." His rather provocative evaluation of Western nations' attempts to fix the problems of the "Rest" attributes these historical failures, as he categorizes the majority of NGO and governmental actions, to having too many "plans."

The IMF, World Bank, United Nations, United States, and Jeffrey Sachs, the charismatic director of the United Nations Millennium Project, are all "planners" according to Easterly. They dedicate all of their collective and individual time and talents to donating vast sums to impoverished nations and "planning" how those funds will be used. By contrast, "searchers" focus their efforts on addressing self-identified needs in communities struggling with specific problems. For Easterly, these searchers are the beginning, middle, and end to all of the problems with which the "Rest" contend. "Planners," he writes, "announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; searchers find things that work and get some rewards. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; searchers find out what is in demand." In this formulation, if the West were to place its great fortunes and resources in the hands of those willing to search for real solutions to real problems, Easterly is convinced that aid would reach those who need it the most.