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  The WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

  Also by William Easterly

  The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures

  and Misadventures in the Tropics

  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

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  NEW YORK

  2006

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2006 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © William Easterly, 2006

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Easterly, William Russell.

  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.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1812-9

  1. Economic assistance—Developing countries. 2. Poverty—Prevention. I. Title.

  HC59.7.E22 2006

  338.91'1713—dc22

  2005055516

  Designed by Stephanie Huntwork

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  FOR RACHEL, CALEB, AND GRACE, AS ALWAYS

  TO LIZZIE, WITH LOVE AND RESPECT

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Planners Versus Searchers

  PART I

  WHY PLANNERS CANNOT BRING PROSPERITY

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Legend of the Big Push

  CHAPTER THREE

  You Can’t Plan a Market

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Planners and Gangsters

  PART II

  ACTING OUT THE BURDEN

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bailing Out the Poor

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

  PART III

  THE WHITE MAN’S ARMY

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  From Colonialism to Postmodern Imperialism

  CHAPTER NINE

  Invading the Poor

  PART IV

  THE FUTURE

  CHAPTER TEN

  Homegrown Development

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Future of Western Assistance

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  The

  WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

  SNAPSHOT: AMARETCH

  IAM DRIVING OUT OF Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to the countryside. An endless line of women and girls is marching in the opposite direction, into the city. They range in age from nine to fifty-nine. Each one is bent nearly double under a load of firewood. The heavy loads propel them forward almost at a trot. I think of slaves driven along by an invisible slave driver. They are carrying the firewood from miles outside of Addis Ababa, where there are eucalyptus forests, and across the denuded lands encircling the city. The women bring the wood to the main city market, where they will sell it for a couple of dollars. That will be it for their day’s income, as it takes all day for them to heft firewood into Addis and to walk back.

  I later found that BBC News had posted a story about one of the firewood collectors. Amaretch, age ten, woke up at 3:00 A.M. to collect eucalyptus branches and leaves, then began the long and painful march into the city. Amaretch, whose name means “beautiful one,” is the youngest of four children in her family. She says: “I don’t want to have to carry wood all my life. But at the moment I have no choice because we are so poor. All of us children carry wood to help our mother and father buy food for us. I would prefer to be able to just go to school and not have to worry about getting money.1

  When another group of Western television cameramen encountered the depths of poverty in Ethiopia for the first time, they went back to their hotel rooms and cried their eyes out.2 That is the right response. What can be more important? I dedicate this book to Amaretch, and to the millions of children like her around the world.

  CHAPTER ONE

  PLANNERS VERSUS SEARCHERS

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  In patience to abide,

  To veil the threat of terror

  And check the show of pride;

  By open speech and simple,

  An hundred times made plain,

  To seek another’s profit

  And work another’s gain.

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  The savage wars of peace—

  Fill full the mouth of Famine,

  And bid the sickness cease.

  RUDYARD KIPLING,

  “THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN,” 1899

  U NITED KINGDOM CHANCELLOR of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is eloquent about one of the two tragedies of the world’s poor. In January 2005, he gave a compassionate speech about the tragedy of extreme poverty afflicting billions of people, with millions of children dying from easily preventable diseases. He called for a doubling of foreign aid, a Marshall Plan for the world’s poor, and an International Financing Facility (IFF) against which tens of billions more dollars toward future aid could be borrowed to rescue the poor today. He offered hope by pointing out how easy it is to do good. Medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only twelve cents a dose. A bed net to prevent a child from getting malaria costs only four dollars. Preventing five million child deaths over the next ten years would cost just three dollars for each new mother. An aid program to give cash to families who put their children in school, getting children like Amaretch into elementary school, would cost little.3

  Gordon Brown was silent about the other tragedy of the world’s poor. This is the tragedy in which the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spen
t $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get three dollars to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion, and Amaretch is still carrying firewood and not going to school. It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring these results for needy people.

  In a single day, on July 16, 2005, the American and British economies delivered nine million copies of the sixth volume of the Harry Potter children’s book series to eager fans. Book retailers continually restocked the shelves as customers snatched up the book. Amazon and Barnes & Noble shipped preordered copies directly to customers’ homes. There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards.4 It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.

  This book is about that second tragedy. Visionaries, celebrities, presidents, chancellors of the exchequer, bureaucracies, and even armies address the first tragedy, and their compassion and hard work deserve admiration. Many fewer address the second tragedy. I feel like kind of a Scrooge pointing out the second tragedy when there is so much goodwill and compassion among so many people to help the poor. I speak to many audiences of good-hearted believers in the power of Big Western Plans to help the poor, and I would so much like to believe them myself. I often feel like a sinful atheist who has somehow wound up in the meeting of the conclave of cardinals to choose the successor to the saintly John Paul II. Where there is a lot of consensus for Big Plans to help the poor, the audience receives my doubts about these plans about as well as the cardinals would receive my nomination of the pop singer Madonna to be the next Pope.

  But I and many other like-minded people keep trying, not to abandon aid to the poor, but to make sure it reaches them. Rich countries have to address the second tragedy if they are going to make any progress on the first tragedy. Otherwise, the current wave of enthusiasm for addressing world poverty will repeat the cycle of its predecessors: idealism, high expectations, disappointing results, cynical backlash.

  The second tragedy is due to the mistaken approach that traditional Western assistance takes toward world poverty. So has this book finally found, after all these years, the right Big Plan to reform foreign aid, to enrich the poor, to feed the hungry, and to save the dying? What a breakthrough if I have found such a plan when so many other, much smarter, people than I have tried many different plans over fifty years, and have failed.

  You can relax; your author has no such delusions of grandeur. All the hoopla about having the right plan is itself a symptom of the misdirected approach to foreign aid taken by so many in the past and so many still today. The right plan is to have no plan.

  Planners’ Failure, Searchers’ Success

  Let’s call the advocates of the traditional approach the Planners, while we call the agents for change in the alternative approach the Searchers. The short answer on why dying poor children don’t get twelve-cent medicines, while healthy rich children do get Harry Potter, is that twelve-cent medicines are supplied by Planners while Harry Potter is supplied by Searchers.

  This is not to say that everything should be turned over to the free market that produced and distributed Harry Potter. The poorest people in the world have no money to motivate market Searchers to meet their desperate needs. However, the mentality of Searchers in markets is a guide to a constructive approach to foreign aid.

  In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. 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. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied. Will Gordon Brown be held accountable if the new wave of aid still does not get twelve-cent medicines to children with malaria?

  A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

  Columbia University professor and director of the United Nations Millennium Project Jeffrey Sachs is an eloquent and compassionate man. I am always moved when I listen to him speak. Unfortunately, his intellectual solutions are less convincing. Professor Sachs offers a Big Plan to end world poverty, with solutions ranging from nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially programmed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations, to twelve-cent medicines for children with malaria—for a total of 449 interventions. Professor Sachs has played an important role in calling upon the West to do more for the Rest, but the implementation strategy is less constructive. According to Professor Sachs and the Millennium Project, the UN secretary-general should run the plan, coordinating the actions of officials in six UN agencies, the UN country teams, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a couple of dozen rich-country aid agencies. This Plan is the latest in a long string of Western plans to end poverty.

  So for the twelve-cent medicines, the Planners are distracted by simultaneously doing the other 448 interventions; they don’t have enough local information to know how many children in each locale have malaria and how many doses of medicine are needed at each of the myriad health clinics; they don’t have agents motivated to get those doses there; the local health workers are poorly paid and poorly motivated; many different aid agencies are doing many different interventions on the health system and on malaria; nobody knows who or what to blame if the twelve-cent medicines are out of stock in the local health clinic and do not reach the dying children; and the local parents don’t even have a way of communicating to the Planners whether the medicines have reached them.

  Searchers have better incentives and better results. When a high willingness to pay for a thing coincides with low costs for that thing, Searchers will find a way to get it to the customer.

  The market rewarded book retailers, wholesalers, and publishers who got Harry Potter to those fanatically awaiting the latest installment on July 16,2005. Those retailers, wholesalers, and publishers have a strong incentive to have Harry Potter always in stock. Myriad children’s book authors search for compelling characters and narratives that will attract readers and earn them income. When J. K. Rowling, a Scottish single mother on welfare, hit upon the story of a teenage wizard who triumphs over evil, she became one of the richest women in the world.

  Searchers could find ways to make a specific task—such as getting medicines to dying children—work if they could concentrate on that task instead of on Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure if the task didn’t work. We will see some areas where Searchers have already achieved tangible benefits, but they have had little chance to deliver in the area of global poverty because foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

  The Planners have the rhetorical advantage of promising great things: the end of poverty. The only thing the Planners have against them is that they gave us the second tragedy of the world’s poor. Poor people die not only because of the wor
ld’s indifference to their poverty, but also because of ineffective efforts by those who do care. To escape the cycle of tragedy, we have to be tough on the ideas of the Planners, even while we salute their goodwill.

  Big Problems and Big Plans

  Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, adjusted for purchasing power.5 Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don’t have enough to eat.6 Ten million children die every year from easily preventable diseases.7 AIDS is killing three million people a year and is still spreading.8 One billion people in the world lack access to clean water; two billion lack access to sanitation.9 One billion adults are illiterate.10 About a quarter of the children in the poor countries do not finish primary school.11 So Amaretch is enslaved to a load of firewood instead of playing and learning in a school yard.

  This poverty in the Rest justifiably moves many people in the West. The Western effort deploys a variety of interventions besides foreign aid, including technical advice and lending from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the spread of the knowledge of capitalism and democracy, scientific interventions to cure disease, nation-building, neo-imperialism, and military intervention. Both the Right and the Left participate in this effort.