Review of "The White Man's Burden"

So now a bit of history on the title of this blog - a topic which Jordan is far better suited to cover but we reserving his talent for a review of other development writings.

The title of this blog, “Two White Men with Burdens”, is a tip to William 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”. Similarly, Easterly’s book is a tongue in cheek reference to the poem by Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (or the Wiki-link) However, Easterly's book is even more of a direct response to Jeffrey Sach's "The End of Poverty". (In fact, the two are listed as "Opposed" in their Wikipedia entries.)

I first read WMB somewhere in the middle of term term in Tanzania and it immediately struck a chord with me. As I read it, I was in the middle of my own development projects (I cringe to use that term) but more importantly I was familiar enough with my community to begin to recognize the ghosts and failures of so many projects that had gone before me.

Easterly provides a fairly easy read starting with an overview of the differences between the economic systems of western capitalism and the systems of traditional development work. His main argument is that while capitalism is driven by Searchers (entrepreneurs looking for a demand market that is not being met) , the development world is largely made up of Planners (people who assume they know the answer from their own experience disconnected from ground work developing strategies solely on paper). Throughout the book he provides case studies of development projects that have failed because they have far too much outside planning. What I found even more interesting was his contrasting of aid between various countries. With admittedly broad strokes he reviews many of the countries which received IMF money (ie BIG money) IMF over the last 50 years and where they are now. (Hint: It's not a pretty picture.) He contrasts this with places and countries that did NOT receive IMF aid and it makes for an interesting observation.

At the end of the book he does provide his own, albeit in my opinion, weak suggestion for how to reform the aid industry. He talks about "aid dollars" with which the recipients of aid project could vote, or buy, the aid projects that they were interested in from the aid agencies that they trusted. It is an interesting thought and does begin to address his criticism that there is no proper feed-back mechanism within the aid industry in which agency's are answerable to their donors and not the people they are trying to serve.
(Also read the NYTime's review of "White Man's Burden)

In some of our correspondence Jordan enlightened me to the fact that the one thing Easterly does NOT do very well is acknowledge the growing body of research that demonstrates his points very clearly. In other words, he leaves the reader to assume that he was the first to hold and promote this perspective on development. But I think Jordan may expound on this a bit more next week.
And I would be amiss not to acknowledge Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with very impressive credentials. She wrote "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa". This book is fairly high up on my to-read list and hopefully I can read it before the end of this year.
(Interesting disclosure. I had always had a bit of reservations for Bono's (lead singer from U2 - no links, you look him up) views on aid for Africa. I really appreciate Bono for a number of other reasons but in doing this research I've realised that he is on of the Sach's camp and definitely not in the Easterly / Moyo camp which is unfortunate in my opion.)

Well, there you have it, not the most interesting post but for those of you with the same sentiments (and especially anyone of differing sentiments!) please give it a read.

Kurtis (wrapping up my first semester in Waterloo)