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  To oversimplify by a couple of gigawatts, the needs of the rich get met because the rich give feedback to political and economic Searchers, and they can hold the Searchers accountable for following through with specific actions. The needs of the poor don’t get met because the poor have little money or political power with which to make their needs known and they cannot hold anyone accountable to meet those needs. They are stuck with Planners. The second tragedy continues.

  Why Are Planners So Popular?

  In any human endeavor, the people paying the bills are the ones to keep happy. The big problem with foreign aid and other Western efforts to transform the Rest is that the people paying the bills are rich people who have very little knowledge of poor people. The rich people demand big actions to solve big problems, which is understandable and compassionate. The Big Plans at the top keep the rich people happy that “something is being done” about such a tragic problem as world poverty. In June 2005, the New York Times ran an editorial advocating a Big Plan for Africa titled “Just Do Something.” Live 8 concert organizer Bob Geldof said, “Something must be done; anything must be done, whether it works or not.21 Something, anything, any Big Plan would take the pressure off the rich to address the critical needs of the poor. Alas, if ineffective big plans take the pressure off the rich to help the poor, there’s the second tragedy, because then the effective piecemeal actions will not happen.

  The prevalence of ineffective plans is the result of Western assistance happening out of view of the Western public. Fewer ineffective approaches would survive if results were more visible. The Big Plans are attractive to politicians, celebrities, and activists who want to make a big splash, without the Western public realizing that those plans at the top are not connected to reality at the bottom.

  Popular books, movies, and television shows are full of plotlines that feature a hero, the chosen one, who saves the world. The Harry Potter series is a particularly successful variation on this plotline: an ordinary teenager who triumphs over evil with courage and compassion.

  We all love the fantasy of being the chosen one. Is part of the explanation for the Big Plan’s Western popularity that it stars the rich West in the leading role, that of the chosen people to save the Rest?

  The Planners-versus-Searchers divide is not equal to Left versus Right. The Big Plans show remarkable bipartisan support from both the rich-world Left and the rich-world Right. The Left likes the idea of a big state-led effort to fight global poverty. The Right likes the idea of benevolent imperialism to spread Western capitalism and subdue opposition to the West. So, as this book will explore, we get a bizarre conjuncture of foreign aid on the left and military interventions on the right (although each might disavow the other). Few military crusaders or aid advocates can resist the temptation to play Harry Potter.

  Likewise, the critique of the Big Plan mainstream comes from dissidents on both the Left and the Right. The right-wing dissident says that hope for the poor will come mainly from homegrown markets and democracy. The left-wing dissident doesn’t like the Western imperialists trying to remake the poor in the West’s image. Both right-wing and left-wing dissidents are on the right track. The Searchers in the middle agree that neither the Big Plans of the Left nor those of the Right (neither foreign aid nor foreign military intervention) can end poverty in the Rest—let’s just find some specific things that help poor people.

  To be sure, many people who work on world poverty are distant from the fantasies and really just want to help the poor and try hard to do their jobs well. Planners come in many varieties, which are sometimes in sharp disagreement, and many of them do not embrace the extremes cited here. Yet the fondness for the Big Goal and the Big Plan is strikingly widespread. It’s part of the second tragedy that so much goodwill and hard work by rich people who care about the poor goes through channels that are ineffective.

  The working-level people in aid agencies or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are more likely to be Searchers than Planners. Unfortunately, the political realities of rich countries—the bipartisan support for Big Plans—foist on these workers these plans, taking money, time, and energy away from the doable actions that workers discover in their searching.

  Utopianism

  Nineteenth-century utopian socialist Robert Owen was excited about the industrial revolution. Anticipating the world leaders’ Millennium Declaration a century and a half later, he said in a book in 1857, “Let not the leading powers of the world longer hesitate what course to take.” If only they embrace the right plan, “the human race shall be perpetually well born, fed, clothed, lodged, trained, educated, employed, and recreated, locally and generally governed, and placed to enjoy life in the most rational matter on earth, and to best fit them for whatever change may occur after death.22 Owen has been discredited ever since as a utopian. Yet with the exception of the reference to preparing for life after death, there are strong parallels between his nineteenth-century rhetoric and that of a modern Planner such as Jeffrey Sachs (see box). Utopia is making a comeback today.

  ROBERT OWEN, 1857

  JEFFREY SACHS, 2005

  “if you will now agree among yourselves to call a Congress of the leading governments of the world, inviting those of China, Japan, Burmah, & c.,…a new state of rational existence for men shall arise, when truth, peace, harmony, perpetual prosperity, and happiness shall reign triumphant”

  “in September 2000 [was] the largest gathering of world leaders in history…The document…adopted by the assembled leaders…surveys the issues of war and peace, health and disease, and wealth and poverty, and commits the world to a set of undertakings to improve the human condition”. *

  “through the progress of physical and mental science…all the…means in superabundance to well-feed, clothe, lodge, train, educate, amuse and govern the human race in perpetual progressive-prosperity—without war…these results may now, for the first time in the history of the world, be accomplished”

  “technological progress enables us to meet basic human needs…and to achieve a margin above basic needs unprecedented in history” “our breathtaking opportunity…[is to] spread the benefits of science and technology…to all parts of the world…to secure a perpetual peace…”.

  “when…they shall have imbibed the spirit of universal love and charity…then will be the direct path to the permanent superior happiness of our race…be attainable”

  “The world community has at its disposal the…human courage and compassion to make it happen” (introduction to Millennium Project Report, January 2005)

  “these results may now…be accomplished…with far less difficulty and in less time than will be imagined”

  “success in ending the poverty trap will be much easier than it appears”

  “all the petty isolated schemes hitherto proposed by well-intentioned but inexperienced and short-sighted reformers will be abandoned as useless for the ultimate objects to be attained”

  “to do things piecemeal is vacuous” ( Washington Post, March 27, 2005) “Even more to the point, success in any single area, whether in health, or education, or farm productivity, depends on investments across the board”

  Unfortunately, the new fondness for utopia is not just harmless inspirational rhetoric. The setting of utopian goals means aid workers will focus efforts on infeasible tasks, instead of the feasible tasks that will do some good.

  Desperate Needs

  The effort wasted on the plans is all the more tragic when we consider some of the simple, desperate needs of the poor, which Searchers could address piecemeal. In a typical country in Africa, one third of the children under five have stunted growth due to malnutrition. A group of women in Nigeria report that they were too weakened by hunger to breast-feed their babies. Throughout Africa, there is a long “hungry season,” when the stores from the last harvest run out and the new crop becomes available. Even in a more prosperous region such as Latin America, one fifth of the children suffer from malnutrition. Malnutr
ition lowers the life potential of children and makes them more vulnerable to killer diseases. As a woman in Voluntad de Dios, Ecuador, put it, children get sick “because of lack of food. We are poor. We have no money to buy or to feed ourselves.23

  In Kwalala, Malawi, wells break down during the rainy season because of lack of maintenance. Villagers are forced to take their drinking water from the lake, even though they know it is contaminated with human waste from the highlands. This practice causes diseases such as diarrhea and schistosomiasis.24 Schistosomiasis is caused by parasitic worms passed along through contaminated water; it causes damage to the lungs, liver, bladder, and intestines.25

  An old man in Ethiopia says: “Poverty snatched away my wife from me. When she got sick, I tried my best to cure her with tebel [holy water] and woukabi [spirits], for these were the only things a poor person could afford. However, God took her away. My son, too, was killed by malaria. Now I am alone.26

  Surveys of Brazilian favelas find terrible sewage problems. In Nova California, “The sewage running in front of the houses causes disease, and no one can stand the smell. When it rains, it comes in the front door, and one has to take everything up off the floor.” In Vila União, “In the winter, the sewers overflow and the streets flood, to say nothing of the mosquito invasion. And here in the favela some houses do not have toilets, so people use the street.” In Morro da Conceição, sewage causes the children to get sick and creates “a terrible smell.27

  Chinwe Okoro, twenty-six, lives in the farming village of Okpuje, in southeastern Nigeria. Chinwe’s widowed mother cut his schooling short so he could contribute to the family income from farm jobs and harvesting oil palm. Besides oil palm, Okpuje also produces cassava, yam, and handicrafts. Bad roads out of the village make the cost of transport of local goods to the market about five times higher than it would be with good roads, lowering Chinwe’s income and opportunities. The isolation caused by bad roads makes health workers and teachers reluctant to accept postings in Okpuje. I have been on corrugated, potholed, and muddy roads in Africa, and they are indeed agony. The villagers also must travel on the bad roads to get water, since the thirteen-year-old local well broke down four years ago and hasn’t been repaired. Women and children walk up to eight kilometers to get spring water; some travel twenty-two kilometers on the bad roads to the nearest town to buy water.28

  Some success stories show that aid agencies can make progress on problems like these. There have been successful programs feeding the hungry, which means children have been able to get food in Voluntad de Dios, Ecuador. Success on expanding access to clean water helped the villagers of Kwalala, Malawi. In Mbwadzulu, Malawi, in fact, the drilling of two new boreholes has allowed villagers to discontinue using polluted lake water, and has led to a decline in cholera.29 The Ethiopian man’s tragedy could have been avoided with cheap medicines. Brazilian favelas could get proper sanitation; in fact, there has already been progress there on sanitation compared with a decade ago. The isolation of Okpuje, Nigeria, could be alleviated by building and maintaining a good road. Broken-down wells can be repaired in Kwalala and Okpuje. Aid agencies could do much more on these problems if they were not diverting their energies to utopian Plans and were accountable for tasks such as getting food, roads, water, sanitation, and medicines to the poor.

  White Man’s Burden: Historical Cliffs Notes

  As the example of Robert Owen shows, the fondness for utopian solutions to the Rest’s problems is not new—it is a theme throughout the history of the West and the Rest. The Big Plans that would one day become foreign aid and military intervention appeared as early as the eighteenth century. Most accounts stress an abrupt transition from colonialism to foreign aid and benevolent military intervention, and of course there were major changes in the attitudes and policies of the West. Yet it is instructive also to see the themes that persist. From the beginning, the interests of the poor got little weight compared with the vanity of the rich. The White Man’s Burden emerged from the West’s self-pleasing fantasy that “we” were the chosen ones to save the Rest. The White Man offered himself the starring role in an ancien régime version of Harry Potter.

  The Enlightenment saw the Rest as a blank slate—without any meaningful history or institutions of its own—upon which the West could inscribe its superior ideals. As the Comte de Buffon put it, “It is through the European that civilization arrives…precisely because of their superiority, the civilized peoples are responsible for an evolving world.” The Marquis de Condorcet said, “These vast lands…need only assistance from us to become civilized.30

  Even when making beneficial piecemeal reforms, such as the British antislave trade campaign in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, white arrogance was not going to disappear anytime soon. British Tory Sir Robert Peel said in a speech in June 1840 that unless whites stopped the slave trade, they never would convince Africans “of the superiority of their European fellow men.31

  As one of the leaders of the antislavery movement, William Wilberforce, subsequently said about India, “Must we not then…endeavour to raise these wretched beings out of their present miserable condition?.32 James Mill in 1810 said, “For the sake of the natives” in India, the British could not “leave them to their own direction.33

  Even the Berlin Conference of 1885, which divided Africa among European colonizers—who resembled children scrambling for candy as the piñata breaks open—included some altruistic language. The signatories were to “aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization.34

  A rare dissenter, Mark Twain, satirized the civilizing effort as of 1901: “The Blessings of Civilization…could not be better, in a dim light…. With the goods a little out of focus, they furnish this desirable exhibit: Law and Order…Liberty…Honorable Dealing…Protection to the Weak…Education…is it good? Sir, it is pie. It will bring into camp any idiot that sits in darkness anywhere.35

  The covenant of the League of Nations adopted after World War I promised the “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves” that “the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization.” Therefore, “the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations.36 Only a few doubters wondered whether such tutelage might be “a greater trial to subject races than a more primitive…form of exploitation.37

  A shift in language (and also in thought) occurred after World War II. Verbiage about racial superiority, the tutelage of backward peoples, and people not ready to rule themselves went into the wastebasket. Self-rule and decolonization became universal principles. The West exchanged the old racist coinage for a new currency. “Uncivilized” became “underdeveloped.” “Savage peoples” became the “third world.” There was a genuine change of heart away from racism and toward respect for equality, but a paternalistic and coercive strain survived. Later chapters of this book will examine the lessons of colonial history for today’s “nation-building.”

  Meanwhile, the enterprise of the West transforming the Rest got a new name: foreign aid. Foreign aid began with the Point Four Program of Harry S. Truman. His inaugural address on January 20, 1949, said (anticipating Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Millennium Project by half a century), “We must embark on a bold new program for…the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery…. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.” Truman ignored past Westernization attempts as if they were hick relatives at a Park Avenue wedding: “for the first time in history” we know how to help the Rest (“these people”).

  Truman broke the ground. Soon was born the development expert, the heir to the missionary and the colonial officer. A United Nations group of experts two years after Truman concluded that “a 2 percent increase in the per capita national incomes” required foreign aid of “about $3 billion a year.” In 1960, Walt Rostow’s bestse
lling book The Stages of Economic Growth proclaimed that “an increase of $4 billion in external aid would be required to lift all of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America into regular growth, at an increase of per capita income of say, 1.5% per annum.” There was some self-interest at work here. Rostow subtitled his book A Non-Communist Manifesto. The West (the first world) competed with the Communists (the second world) to offer the third world the One Path. The West strove to convince the Rest that material prosperity was more feasible under freedom (private property, free markets, and democracy) than under communism. Sometimes the West’s military had to make sure the Rest stayed on the path to prosperity. The cold war would influence the Western effort for decades to come (just as the war on terrorism influences foreign assistance today).

  Rostow was an adviser to John F. Kennedy, who declared in 1961 that “existing foreign aid programs and concepts are largely unsatisfactory…we intend during this coming decade of development to achieve a decisive turnaround in the fate of the less-developed world, looking toward the ultimate day…when foreign aid will no longer be needed.”

  Implementing this crusade brought an alphabet soup of agencies created after World War II: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the African Development Bank (AFDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and many more.