Remember rubber mantra bracelets? Of course you do; you may have put one on this morning that said "livestrong" or "support our troops" or "treehugger." The wristbands encapsulate everything that Bill Easterly finds best and worst about Western efforts to save the world. In The White Man's Burden, Easterly respectfully admires the idealism, generosity, and energy of well-intentioned citizens of the developed world, devising mass campaigns both to raise their fellow Westerners' awareness and effect sweeping change. Whether it's a rubber bracelet or a Live8 concert or a new Somalian penpal, altruistic enterprises are increasing the ways to make helping feel good, not perfunctory.

Feeling helpful feels so good, Easterly argues, that we've become addicted to aiding the underprivileged and "backward" just as much as some recipients become dependent on that aid. What's worse, the cycle of giving, receiving, and re-giving happens irrespective of the efficacy of the aid program, and in fact some evidence suggests that Western agencies may actually pour more aid into proven failing projects than into more successful programs or needed research and analysis. Such an approach to aid focuses on maximizing the donor's sense of usefulness, assuaged conscience, and self-worth—good for our psyches but unproductive for the desperate bodies we purport to help.

Easterly calls the typical institution of this kind, which starts with Western norms and goals and then superimposes them upon developing nations in need of help, a Planner. "Planners" and "Searchers" become the governing dichotomy of The White Man's Burden : "Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility... 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." Easterly lists perhaps a dozen more contrasts, but in case you can't keep the list straight, you'll capture 95% of Easterly's point if you remember that "the right plan is to have no plan." Planners are the blockheads; Searchers are smart.

From the start, this dualistic mindset creates pitfalls of oversimplification. Planners and Searchers together encompass the West, alternately referred to as donor societies or the White Man. Everyone else is the Rest, the receivers, the White Man's perceived Burden. This model works well for states that neatly fit their half of the mold, like the US (though even here, one-fifth of the population identifies itself as non-white or of mixed race); but what about the impoverished West, like Mexico or Russia , or, until recently, Ireland ? And what about wealthy non-Western donor nations like Japan ? Japan, for example, though hardly "White Man" territory, offers Official Development Assistance (ODA) to 150 countries, including more aid to Bangladesh (which Easterly characterizes as a consequence of Western snafu) than the US or the UN. Easterly's labels only approximate the complexity of real life—exactly the complexity that he worries Planners ignore.

Even the "have no plan" maxim falls short of Easterly's actual meaning, which is roughly twofold: have no macrocosmic plan, only small-scale ones; and have no plan that isn't grounded in empirical evidence. Don't invest in a billion dollar milk-and-cookie production plan to incentivize Santa's gift-giving until you're sure he exists. And likes cookies.

Unfortunately, empiricism seems to be in scarce supply among aid institutions, and the dearth has resulted in the "second tragedy" of development. The first, of course, is the breadth and depth of extreme poverty across the globe. The second is less graphic but more damning: donors have been throwing money at the poverty problem for generations, but nothing has improved. Aid over the past half-century amounted to $2.3 trillion, yet over 1 billion people worldwide still survive on less than a dollar each day. Of those, fifty thousand will die today of poverty-related causes.

Easterly largely blames the non-results on the "myth of the Poverty Trap," that poor countries are stuck in a rut against their will, and just need one big boost to set them on the road to recovery again. He offers logic, anecdote, and statistical research to dispel the "myth," which economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, using equally hard science and rational theory, still support. The biggest quantifiable difference between the Easterly and Sachs data, at least as evidenced in White Man's Burden, comes from a date discrepancy: Sachs focuses on data from 1985 to the present, while Easterly begins as early as 1950. There seems to me no obvious reason why one timeline is preferable to the other; Easterly has the advantage of a more longitudinal, comprehensive panorama, but Sachs examines data from a more contemporary—and thus more applicable and understandable—world to our own. Easterly's half-century perspective echoes his theory that the West versus the Rest division remains surprisingly unchanged, whether in colonialism or the Cold War or the War on Terror.

White Man's Burden posits the universal applicability of Western history and its motives, but not in the universality of specific market problems facing development. People respond to incentives, economics preaches, but one man's incentive is another man's deterrent, depending on their particular needs and values. Moreover, markets generally adjust with improved information about the needs of demand and the abilities of supply. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank forget these tenets, he argues, by imposing top-down templates that ignore the different needs and incentives of a situation's demand for aid; they then ignore feedback from the aid "customers" that could help rectify past blunders. "No amount of rhetoric can paper over the contradiction between the IMF dictating conditions and 'popular participation,'" he fumes. "We will tell you what to do, as well as promise you that you are doing it of your own free will."

Ironically, some of the feedback desirable to a healthy market may be that a region or situation is unready for a free market. In this case, Easterly maintains that markets must make themselves in their own good time. Again he points to history, including the scathing track record of "structural adjustment loans," an aid-lending policy spawned in the 1980s and conditional upon recipients' adopting a free market system. This was, of course, the Cold War, so "free market" also meant anti-communism and anti-Soviet, implying political and potentially military conformity to the West as well as economic mimesis.

Just as morally ambiguous as the political and economic steering of the past (and, one could argue, the present) are Easterly's contemporary examples of attempted culture-engineering. Congressional legislation on overseas AIDS relief dictates that at least 1/3 of prevention funds must be allocated to abstinence-only programs. Not only have multiple studies shown the inefficacy of such programs, but recipient nations might justifiably find a donor's prohibitive stance both self-righteous and culturally insensitive. A more pragmatic Searcher approach, based more on statistical correlations than societal transformations, finds that "money spent on educating prostitutes saves between one thousand and one hundred times more lives than the same amount of money spent on retroviral treatment." If you believe, as Easterly does, that "the aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies," then the numbers win.

The Searcher emphasis on objective data combined with innovative response yields some inspiring examples. There's the Bangladeshi doctor who taught a roving army of local teenage girls to serve as semi-professional obstetricians and midwives to reduce childbirth mortality. The water pipe that saved Ethiopian villagers arduous hours of time and energy climbing to mountain springs. The private bathrooms that prevented teenage girls from dropping out of school because of the shame of menstruation. These "piecemeal reforms" change lives, one tiny detail at a time.

Sometimes, though, individual initiatives and small-scale reforms can't do it. And here Easterly suffers a blind spot: that sometimes big institutions are the only answer. Railroads, for example, can't be done piecemeal. Even American history, despite our predominant ethos of free-marketeering and minimal government interference, contains the lesson of the transcontinental railroad, made possible by radical government legislation and funding in the 1860s. No single group of private investors could stake that much capital for that much risk. So top-down government planning and funding took over where ground-level market forces failed. As in most bureaucratic projects, the railroad scheme suffered its share of corruption and mismanagement. But within a decade the railroad dramatically altered the US economy by facilitating transport and communications, a sort of proto-globalization on our own soil.

Another thing large-scale, big institution management might be good for is the coordination of interconnected piecemeal "Searcher"-style reforms. Easterly laments his past folly for believing "that partial reform would not work unless all of the complementary reforms happened quickly and simultaneously." I suspect, though, that he was right the first time. Distinct facets of poverty do not exist in a vacuum.

Let's say, for example, that the poor in a certain area have few job prospects to escape poverty because of a lack of education. A Searcher might build a school with state of the art facilities perfectly tailored to the needs and cultural context of the region. As some of America 's own depressed school districts have shown, though, children who attend school without a healthy breakfast beforehand and an afternoon lunch can't concentrate or perform at the level of their well-fed peers. So the school has mediocre success. Now let's say another Searcher in a different but identical town targets the malnutrition of its children. In this town, children are stronger and more alert, making them healthier but also more capable of joining the workforce early to supplement their parents' meager incomes. Neither village's piecemeal reform is creating a significant path to a higher standard of living.

Curiously, some of Easterly's arguments intending to support small interventions rather than large ones simply disprove the efficacy of either. One study showed a fascinating correlation: "artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunization, and less access to clean water." The logic goes that straight-line countries probably take shape that way because of arbitrary and probably contentious agreements following a war or colonization, whereas seemingly strange borders probably reflect more organic divisions of culture and geography that lead to cohesive nation-states and less conflicted relations with neighbors. The finding is enlightening but pragmatically useless, of course, since even the most rabid neo-imperialist or pipe-dream idealist would balk at the notion of redrawing the world's borders in a fell swoop.

Similarly, Easterly points to a "strong positive association between trust and income," meaning that richer societies tend to have more trust among members than poorer societies. Again, an interesting but largely futile observation, since the "solution"—create a more trusting society, and its incomes will rise—is well nigh impossible to implement. In a market setting, tangible trust indicators might include protocols of credit, safeguards on quality of goods, and the amount of contracts and red tape needed to start a business. The trust dilemma creates a classic "who trusts first" game theory problem. Whoever suspends suspicion first risks getting burned by a more selfish opportunist. Even assuming that all sides scrap their defense mechanisms, such a disarmament could worsen the problem.

Big families with big appetites experience this dilemma every night at dinner. With a fixed quantity of food on the table, siblings might eat their portion fast, then dig in for second helpings from the serving dish or from their own brother or sister's plate. As a result, all the children learn to eat fast and to keep their elbows on the table to fend off attacks, not trusting in the generosity and courtesy of their kin. A World-Bank-like parent might mandate that if the children want food, they must conform to societal norms and keep their elbows off the table. Children concede to this measure of coerced trust, but compensate by eating even faster to get to the serving dish sooner, causing resentment and indigestion all around.

In addition, Easterly veers toward reverse causality as he interprets the trust-income correlation. Rather than engineering the mechanisms of trust, it would be more helpful (and humbling) to realize that trust is a luxury and comes from experience. People trust more when their past interactions with others have gotten them respect, courtesy, and fairness—all the things that, sadly, money can buy.

This occasional fogginess over causality exemplifies Easterly's love-hate relationship with the scientific method. He praises the FDA model of drug testing, which emphasizes randomized design, quantifiable data, and objective interpretation, as a model for the aid community to emulate. Proper science, whether of drugs or development, evaluates one variable at a time, unlike the "typical utopian program" where "everything is done at once and it is impossible to learn what works and what doesn't." A Searcher wants concrete, clear, verifiable evidence. On the other hand, he finds donors' "incentive bias towards observability" "utopian" (again, the favorite pejorative), and mocks the "predilection of the Planner for precise quantification" when a World Bank report estimated that peacekeeping, aid, and reform could cut incidence of civil war from 44 to 22 percent.

If Easterly sometimes suffers from contradictory language and linguistic absurdities, his nemeses in the aid debate fare worse. He cites bleakly comical instances where the Planner institutions, faced with failure or uncertainty, resort to verbal contortions and euphemisms hopelessly detached from reality. When two hard-headed dictators sit in the same room, it's an "extensive consultative process." "Conflict-related reallocation of resources" means war; "differences in priorities and approaches" means outright loggerheads; "weak but improving" means hellish but alive. The unfunny game echoes Orwell's 1946 "Politics and the English Language," in which "millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers . People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements." Have we learned so little in 60 years?

Despite this anesthetized, sanitized rhetoric of the most egregious instances of Planning, Easterly acknowledges, and I wholeheartedly agree, that individuals of the developed world are basically good, well-intentioned, and willing to help those in need. With so much potential goodness to be put to good use in the world, I wish White Man's Burden had given more attention to a vision for the future—a scant twenty pages at the book's end. His advice is terse and not particularly mind-blowing: "Just respond to each local situation according to what people in that situation need and want."

It is also true that even advice and goodness in tandem are not enough. When someone's net good will is outweighed by the sum of countervailing pressures—personal desires, finite energy, avoidance of hassle—the result is apathy, the understandable but not excusable wrong of the privileged world. Apathy can have a thousand different reasons and cost a million different lives. It is, perhaps, a deadlier killer than AIDS. Apathetics deserve a place in any schematizing of the Western character archetypes, alongside Planners and Searchers. Such a triad puts Planners in a more flattering light—at least they're doing something. Easterly does right to criticize the poorly executed actions of Planners, but takes the a priori stance that action is the universally-acknowledged, self-evident, morally-obligatory thing to do when someone else is suffering. Things like upbringing and conscience lead me to agree, but a rational argument to that end on Easterly's part could make the case against Apathy, which Easterly lets off the hook.

The final moral sticking point of White Man's Burden is the strange bedfellows Easterly's argument would yield in practice. Of course, such bizarre alliances exist in the Planner construct, with "neoconservatives on the right supporting 'regime change'" alongside "humanitarians on the left calling for military intervention in whatever human rights emergency makes the headlines." But rejecting large-scale reforms and federal and international institutions in favor of incremental ground-level innovation makes for equally unsettling partnerships. Having read, and mostly believed, Easterly, I still find it hard to sit on my hands about situations like Darfur, and would probably send a large-scale force there if I could—even if Easterly is correct that outsider meddling usually worsens crisis situations. In many cases, doing nothing out of benevolence and wisdom still puts one on the strategic side of those who do nothing out of apathy and those who do nothing out of self-interest. And it's no fun marching to the same beat as the bad guys. Though White Man's Burden comes loaded with possible side effects—an excuse for apathy, a perhaps equally chaotic dismantling of longstanding development institutions—it offers a hard-nosed kind of hope, that a closer look at what the West does for the Rest, and why, might take the first step towards ending the second tragedy.

 

Laura Kolbe '08 has suffered delusions of global and economic know-how since winning a school geography bee and passing several calculus tests.