This book will offer plenty more suggestions for experimental improvements to Western assistance, but don’t expect a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.
(The White Man’s Burden, page 26)

The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top.
(p.94)

William Easterly (born 1957) is an American economist, specialising in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. Surprisingly for an American academic, he’s only written three books, all of them about development economics.

• The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001)
• The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)
• The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014)

This was the second one and established him, as the title suggests, as a robust critic of the entire ideology of western aid to the developing world.

Background

Right at the end of 2005 the doyen of US development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote a book called ‘The End of Poverty’, an optimistic clarion call whose introduction by globally famous rock singer Bono helped propel it into the bestseller list. The book was timed to precede the G8 conference and summit held in Scotland in July 2005. The G8 leaders pledged to double 2004 levels of aid to poor nations from $25 billion to $50 billion by 2010, with half the money going to Africa

This book by William Easterly is by way of being a refutation of Sachs’s one. Very crudely, Sachs said we must give more aid, lots more aid to Africa – and Easterly says ‘oh no we shouldn’t’.

Easterly thinks the messianic save-the-world attitude of people like Sachs is perilously close to the old colonial assumption that We Know Best what to do for the natives.

Right at the start of the book he distinguishes between two types of foreign aid donors: ‘Planners’, who believe in imposing generalised, top-down, big plans on poor countries, and ‘Searchers’, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian romantics while Searchers are more realistic because they focus on piecemeal interventions.

Planners and Searchers

The basic binary or dichotomy idea is repeated countless times:

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.

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.

Searchers have better incentives and better results.

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.

Foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The War on Terror

The new military interventions are similar to the military interventions of the cold war, while the neo-imperialist fantasies are similar to old-time colonial fantasies.

Military intervention in and occupation of a developing country show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in a non-western country. Iraq. Afghanistan.

The aid-financed Big Push is similar to the rationale behind the invasion of Iraq = we in the West know best, we’re going to show you how to run your country. With all the disastrous consequences Easterly’s book predicts for top down, Planner solutions.

Politico-philosophical traditions

Early on Easterly claims that his binary reflects the most basic one in politics, between Utopian revolutionaries and pragmatic reformers. The French Revolution epitomises the first, with its grand Plan to introduce liberty, equality and fraternity. Edmund Burke, father of modern conservatism, epitomises the latter, believing society is best improved by targeting specific identifiable abuses and implementing limited, focused solutions. Ad hoc reforms.

In practice, the latter is how all western democracies work, overflowing with Acts and Bills and Laws fixing this, that or the other issue unaddressed by the vast quantities of previous legislation on the subject. Incremental, reformist.

Capitalism versus communism

And then he related it to another world-size binary, that between capitalism and communism.

Communists believed top-down Big Planning would deliver utopia. Capitalists believe in bottom-up, ad hoc solutions, called businesses, markets. Following on from this is his description of the often overlooked but vital quality of economic freedom which we in the West enjoy without really being aware of it.

Economic freedom is one of mankind’s most underrated inventions, much less publicised than its cousin political freedom. Economic freedom just means unrestricted rights to produce, buy, and sell. Each of us can choose the things we want and not have somebody else decide what is best for us. We can also freely choose what we are going to sell and what occupation to choose, based on our inside knowledge of what we are best at and most like doing.

Easterly overflows with fluent, articulate ways of expressing really big ideas.

The conditions for markets

Property rights, contract enforcement, rule of law, corporate accountability.

On one level, as Easterly makes abundantly clear, he is defending free market capitalist solutions to poverty. But it’s more than that, because he is very well aware that free market capitalism, pure and simple, far from delivers utopia – witness America, the most capitalist society on earth and also the most inequitable (not to mention its vast prison population and violent crime levels).

No, once he’s delivered his broadside against Planners and for Searchers, against communism and for capitalism, Easterly very interestingly goes on to describe the complex matrix of prerequisites necessary for a functioning market and productive economy and the many, many ways these can fall short, be corrupted or undermined.

To put it another way, Easterly launches into a sequence of explanations of what is required to make democratic capitalist society work and these turn out to be numerous and complicated.

No cheating

There are a myriad ways for people to cheat each other in market exchanges. The avoidance of cheating requires a certain amount of social capital or, to put it more simply, trust. He cites studies which have shown a correlation between income and trust i.e. better off people are more trustworthy; poor people are likely to cheat. Hence well off, equal societies like the Scandinavian countries have high median incomes and very high levels of trust. By comparison Mexico is a ‘low trust’ country.

Social norms also seem to be stronger among rich people than among poor people, as a rich person loses more economic opportunities and income from social disgrace.

In better off countries people can rely on the law to enforce norms of honesty although, as anyone knows who’s been to law, it is still i) very expensive ii) tardy and slow iii) has an element of randomness involved, principally in the quality of your solicitor or barrister.

The poorer the country, the less able the majority of citizens are to go to law, and the more likely aspects of corruption will creep in.

Trust networks

There are two tried and tested ways to ensure standards of trust and honesty, working within family or ethnic groups. Family is obvious and the basis of networks of trade and business around the world. Within many societies specialisation in trading is particularly prominent in minority ethnic groups.

In pre-industrial Europe, it was the Jews. In East Africa, it’s the Indians. (Indians own almost all businesses in Kenya, although they make up only 1 percent of the population.) In West Africa, it is the Lebanese. In southern Africa, it is whites and Indians. Among indigenous African groups, often one dominates trading—the Bamileke in Cameroon, the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Hausa in West Africa, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Serahule in the Gambia. In Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese (the “bamboo network”) play this role.

It’s overflowing with concepts like this which he illustrates with detailed and fascinating examples, which entertain and shed light, expanding your understanding of the world we live in.

Mafias

Unfortunately, the down side of strong ethnic networks is they often have their own systems of enforcement, which easily slip into intimidation. The mafia we know about, also the triads which figure largely in Chinese business networks. Drug lords in Jamaica, the farflung Russian mafia. Most societies have criminal networks which enforce their own systems of justice, outside official systems.

Property rights

If you own property you can mortgage it or borrow against it to raise money to invest in business. My shaky understanding of the rise of western capitalism is that we pioneered unique and innovative concepts of property, developed over centuries of adaptation and common law, which enabled the development of the money-making machine we call capitalism.

One aspect of this was the invention of the limited liability company and the corporation, a type of entity. Obviously this takes you into a vast area of history of the evolution of companies, company law, and company law-breaking. Easterly gives some examples but doesn’t go into detail because all he needs is to demonstrate his basis thesis, that:

Property law in the United States, as with many other kinds of law, evolved as piecemeal solutions to deal with particular problems as they arose.

Meanwhile, ‘Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles’. He gives a detailed description of land ‘ownership’, among the Luo tribe in western Kenya.

The traditional system among the Luo was a complicated maze of swapping plots among kin and seasonal exchanges of land for labor and livestock. There were both individual and family rights in cultivated fields and free-grazing rights for the community after the harvest. Each household’s claim to land included many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops grew – not a bad system with which to diversify risk in an uncertain climate. The traditional land patron (weg lowo) would often give temporary land rights to the client (jodak). There were seasonal exchanges of ploughs and draft animals for land, or land for labour.

These may work in the context of their cultures but not many of them approach the objectivity and impersonality found in western concepts of property and companies. It’s small-time, localised.

Britain versus France

Interpreting everything in the light of his binary he applies it to the European traditions of law which he divides into two opposites. Britain good:

The common-law tradition originated in England and spread to British colonies. In this tradition, judges are independent professionals who make rulings on cases based on precedents from similar cases. The principles of the law evolve in response to practical realities, and can be adapted to new situations as they arise.

France bad:

The modern civil-law tradition originated under Napoleon, in France, and spread to French and Spanish colonies. (Spain was under the control of Napoleon at the time.) In this tradition, laws are written from the top down by the legislature to cover every possible situation. Judges are glorified clerks just applying the written law. This system of law lacks bottom-up feedback of the common law that comes from having cases determine law. As a result, the law is less well adapted to reality on the ground and has trouble adapting to new situations as technology and society change.

So:

The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and Uganda are examples of former British colonies that have well-developed property rights protection for their level of income. Algeria, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua are examples of former French or Spanish colonies that have poor property rights protection for their level of income.

Surely Easterly could add in the whole of South America, repeating the centuries-old comparison between the poverty and political instability of the Hispanic south and central America and the (relative) stability and astounding economic success of Anglophone North America. (In fact he rolls on into a section on the dire financial mismanagement of Mexico in the 1990s and makes very interesting points about the limitations of Latin American societies and economies throughout the book.)

The failure to westernise Russia

At the collapse of communism in Russia, in 1991, scads of western economists and consultants descended on Moscow with the aim of showing them commies how it’s done and helping them transition to western-style democracy and capitalism in one ‘Big Push’. Planner behaviour par excellence.

One example of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West. 43 who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct.

You can pass all the laws you like for the establishment of democracy and free markets but if the population they’re imposed on has no experience of either they will continue to behave according to the old ways, via networks of identity and obligation, through widespread ‘corruption’ and nepotism i.e. favouring family, tribe, clan, ethnicity and religious group first. Economic theorist Avinash Dixit’s research:

may help explain why the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union was such a disaster, and why market reforms in Latin America and Africa were disappointing. Even with severely distorted markets, the participants had formed networks of mutual trades and obligations that made the system functional at some level. Trying to change the rules all at once with the rapid introduction of free markets disrupted the old ties, while the new formal institutions were still too weak to make free markets work well.

The Russian people, especially managers of businesses and state industries, carried on ignoring the new capitalist rules in much the same way as they had ignored and circumvented the old communist rules. The Russian economy continued to be ineffective and corrupt. What keeps the Russian economy afloat is its huge reserves of oil and gas. In its dependence on a handful of basic commodities to sell to the rest of the world Russia is more like the petrostates of the Middle East and Africa than like a diversified, productive western economy.

Bad government

Anybody who wants to know about bad government in developing countries, particularly in Africa, should look no further than The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015) and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018).

Democracy works, but imposing democracy from the outside doesn’t.

Trying to impose it quickly failed in Russia, failed in Iraq, failed in most Arab countries after the Arab Spring, and has failed in most African countries where it has been imposed.

This is because democracy doesn’t start with elections every four or five years, but is the end point of a long, complex evolution of social norms and standards of behaviour. These standards are still undermined and not adhered to in many western countries; look at shameful recent events in the UK and America i.e. the Trump presidency and the hilarious incompetence of the Conservative Party. ‘Democracy’ is a kind of Platonic ideal which no individual country actually lives up to.

It is awfully hard to get democracy working well (p.128)

Thus the development of democracy, like that of free markets, in Easterly’s view, is something that evolves slowly over decades, centuries, to address specific social needs.

Just like markets, the functioning of democracy depends on the slow and bottom-up evolution of rules of fair play.

Democracy is an intricate set of arrangements that is far more than just holding elections.

Social norms may be the most difficult part of building a democracy – many poor countries are far from such norms. A staple of elections in many poor countries is to harass and intimidate the opposition so that they don’t vote.

What his account hints at but never quite states is that democracy might just never be the appropriate form of rule for most countries in the world. He hints as much in the section about oligarchies which explains that oligarchies i.e. the rule of a small class, generally a wealthy elite, will be economically effective for a certain period but will inevitably lead to stagnation. At some point an oligarchy realises that it has to make concessions to democracy i.e. the people, the majority of the population, in order to allow change and development, often driven by changing technologies and new economic patterns. Oligarchies stagnate and eventually acknowledge the need for change but the crux of the matter is the terms on which the oligarchy will concede power to the demos. The basis one is that it doesn’t want to give away too much of its power and too much of its money.

This explains the history of South America. All those countries were settled on the Spanish model of economic inequality – silver mines which required huge peasant labour, sugar plantations which required huge slave workforces, vast latifundia worked by big peasant workforces, with a small oppressed proletariat in the cities. A century or more of this established rule by a landed elite, that is their social model or norm.

Perpetual oligarchy is more likely in unequal agrarian or mineral societies than in more equal industrial societies, as Latin America demonstrated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.109)

But societies, technology, cultures and economies change and so Latin American societies see the recurrent pattern of repressive rule by an elite, which is eventually overthrown in a violent revolution which gives hope to the majority of social change and economic redistribution, which the oligarchies permit, up to a point, at which there is a violent counter-revolution i.e. military coup.

The Mexican revolution typifies one part of this see-saw, being a broad social rebellion against the entrenched rule of a narrow elite. The military coup against Allende in Chile represents the opposite end of the cycle, as the forces of money and privilege stepped in when Allende threatened to take away their money and power. South America’s challenge is getting beyond these violent mood swings to achieve the kind of middle class, social democrat stability epitomised by the Scandinavian countries, but this will always be hampered by the legacy of a large, poor, rural peasant class and, these days, by the huge numbers of the poor in the countries’ teeming slums.

Security from violence

This, of course, is a prerequisite for the development of any economy. Western aid will not do much good in a country mired in civil war. Violence is part of the human condition, well, the male human condition. One of the key causes of conflict in the past 70 years since the war has, of course, been ethnic, religious or tribal difference. All the conditions listed above for the development of either markets or democracy are void if your country is mired in conflict, worst of all a civil war.

Reasons why good government may not take hold

• conflict
• elite manipulation of the rules of the political game
• landed wealth
• weak social norms
• the curse of natural resources
• high inequality
• corruption
• ethnic nationalism and hatreds

Part 2. Aid in practice

What I’ve summarised so far is ‘Part 1: Why Planners cannot bring Prosperity’. Part 2 of the book, titled ‘Acting out the burden’ applies these ideas to the actual practice of administering foreign aid, finding the same sorts of conclusions. Easterly very frankly describes himself as one of the hordes of bureaucrats the by-now bloated aid industry:

We bureaucracies will devote effort more to activities that are more observable and less to activities that are less observable. By the same token, we bureaucrats will perform better when we have tangible, measurable goals, and less well when we have vague, ill-defined dreams. We will perform better when there is a clear link from effort to results, and less well when results reflect many factors besides effort. We will perform better when we have fewer objectives, and worse when we have many objectives. We will perform better when we specialize in particular solvable problems, and less well when we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less well when there is confusion about such wants. We will perform better when agents at the bottom are motivated and accountable, and less well when everything is up to the managers at the top. (p.157)

You need to set narrow, achievable targets. You need to listen to feedback from your customers, the poor.

Aid agencies are rewarded for setting goals, not for achieving them. Aid agencies and transnational organisations publish plethoras of reports every year. Incestuous and narcissistic these reports rarely feature the voices of the poor in the developing world. Instead they proliferate aims and goals and targets like bunnies, the vaguer the better. It actually has a name: ‘goal proliferation’.

The UN Millennium Project developed a framework in 2005 with the help of 250 development experts, commissioning thirteen reports from ten task forces. All this helped the project to come up with its framework, with its eighteen indicative targets for the eight MDGs, its ten key recommendations (which are actually thirty-six recommendations when you count all the bullet points), “a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented investment framework over 10 years,” seventeen Quick Wins to be done immediately, seven “main investment and policy clusters,” and ten problems to be solved in the international aid system. (p.164)

Western countries all too often make aid conditional on the promise it will be spent on donor country products and services. Or dependent on the recipient country’s aid in, for example, the War on Terror.

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

A chapter describing the origins, aims and achievements of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF needs to shed its excessive self-confidence that it knows in detail what is best for the poor, based on an analysis of the whole economy that shares the presumptions of utopian planning.

Easterly uses a fair amount of data and graphs. Here he assembles data showing that countries the IMF and World Bank have heavy involvement in tend to have disastrous political and economic records. Of course, you could argue this is because it’s precisely struggling or failing states which they ought to get involved in.

Chapter 7. The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

A chapter on AIDS which, like everything else he discusses, Easterly fits into the terms of his primal binary:

The breakdown of the aid system on AIDS…reflects how out of touch were the Planners at the top with the tragedy at the bottom, another sign of the weak power of the intended beneficiaries. It shows how ineffective Planners are at making foreign aid work. (p.213)

Among a blizzard of facts it contains the riveting statistic that money spent educating prostitutes to be hygienic and insist on condoms can save between 100 and a thousand times more lives than money spent on (very expensive) retroviral drugs once people have contracted HIV (p.227) and both are eclipsed by oral rehydration therapy which can save babies dying of diarrhea or vaccinating against measles.

Aid, like all political-economics, is about choices and trade-offs. Easterly thinks western governments and aid agencies are unduly influenced by high profile, image-led, televisable results, what he calls ‘the bias towards observability’ (p.322). Thus a statistic like ‘number of retroviral drugs sent to Uganda to treat x number of AIDS patients’ eclipses ‘number of children vaccinated against measles thus preventing a measles outbreak and saving an unknown number of children’.

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme I met pundits and theorists who discussed the need for a new imperialism i.e. many developing countries just can’t run themselves and that was in the late 1980s, over 30 years ago.

A decade later it had become a fashionable idea. In Empire Lite (2003) Michael Ignatieff said the West needed to have the courage of its convictions and take control of failing states for the good of their citizens. In Colossus (2004) Niall Ferguson says America should face up to its position as sole superpower and formalise its financial and military control, claiming that there is:

‘such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing…in many cases of economic ‘backwardness,’ a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state.’

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote an article advocating for more western intervention in failing states, thinking which influenced Tony Blair’s famous Chicago speech, a set of ideas which explain his enthusiastic support of George Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and overthrow the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.

Leaving aside the vast culture wars-style furore this would cause, there’s a simpler problem with this superficially attractive idea, which is that the Iraq fiasco proved that the West isn’t, in fact, up to the job.

One reason for this is clearly stated by Rory Stewart and various other commentators on the Iraq and Afghan debacles, namely that the old imperial powers were in it for the long term. Their administrators stayed for decades, got to know and love the local languages and cultures, probably exploited the locals and their resources, but also built schools, roads, railways, abolished slavery, tried to help women (banned suttee etc).

The commentators and analysts he cites talk about ‘postmodern imperialism’. Whatever it’s called, it reeks of the same top down, Planner mentality which came to ruin in Iraq and no just ruin, but laughable, ridiculous ruin.

• Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006)
• Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (2006)

As he says:

One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.

See America’s 20 year, one-trillion-dollar involvement in Afghanistan which reverted to Taliban rule before the last US troops had even left.

I found Easterly’s chapter on the legacy of European colonialism fascinating because its focus is on colonial incompetence rather than malice. The imperialists undermined traditional societies, imposed outside rulers, exacerbated tribal rivalries and drew preposterous borders mainly out of ignorance and stupidity. His detailed examples of blundering interference, destroying local cultures and rulers, embedding conflicts many of which are still with us today, are far more powerful and shaming than the  cheap and easy blanket accusation of ‘racism’.

This emphasis is, of course, because Easterly wants to draw the comparison with modern-day aid agencies, western governments, NGOs and so on who he accuses of comparable amounts of ignorance and outside interference ignoring the wishes and complex realities of the natives. So he presents an entertaining survey of imperial mistakes and cock-ups.

There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present day grief in the Rest. 1) First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. 2) Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. 3) Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.

He describes a detailed analysis he did with academic colleagues. They examined the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries.

Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy, government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunisation against measles, immunisation for diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, and supply of clean water.

They then did something interesting and amusing, which is calculate a value for how wiggly a state’s borders are, on the assumption that long straight borders indicate they were drawn on a map by ignorant colonial bureaucrats, whereas wiggly borders indicate older or more ethnically aligned borders.

We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunisation, and less access to clean water – all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.

Easterly gives extended descriptions of Congo, Palestine and the broader Middle East (Syria, Iraq), India and Sudan, in each case going into much detail to show how ruinous western involvement in each country was.

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

This brings us up to date with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then the Coalition Provisional Authority’s attempt to turn Iraq overnight into a free market capitalist system. Cheerleader of neo-liberal capitalism and post-modern imperialism, Niall Ferguson, is quoted again:

The United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defence budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded…

But Easterly then goes back before the Iraq adventure, back before the fall of communism to look at two case studies of American intervention during the Cold War, in Nicaragua and Angola, a country of ‘spectacular misery’ (p.277). He demonstrates how the West and America in particular never really understood the local history, culture and political dynamics of either country, and how their interventions (supporting the murderous Contra opposition to the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and the psychopath Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist MPLA government in Angola) resulted in decades of misery, extreme violence, unnecessary deaths and economic ruin.

This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

So, to summarise:

The pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson – don’t.

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

By contrast with the sorry record of weak states created by uninformed western bureaucrats, ruled by colonial exploiters and then abandoned to their fate in the 1960s, Easterly contrasts a series of nations which have done very well economically, rising to and sometimes superseding western levels of economic development and which were never colonised. The highest per capita growth rates in the world 1980 to 2002 were enjoyed by South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. What they have in common is they were never colonised but also, more Easterly’s point, found their own paths to economic success and had little or no western aid and intervention.

Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and Southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.

Whereas the bottom ten countries in the per capita growth league are all in Africa, are all former colonies, are all the recipients of massive amounts of western aid, which doesn’t seem to have helped them at all.

He has sections about two of the home-grown high-growth success stories, Singapore and Hong Kong, analysing the reasons for their success. Both were, in fact, British colonies but, crucially, ones where the British authorities were wise enough to leave the local merchants and businessmen to their own devices.

He then goes on to the two giants of Asia, China and India. China’s story is simple. It stopped being a backward country, and took a huge leap forward as soon as the ruling communist party replaced Mao’s repressive, ruinous tyranny with measured, controlled form of Chinese-style capitalism.

In the mid-2000s I worked at the UK Department for International Development for 18 months. On the first day, as I was being shown round, my guide made the frank and disconcerting point that over the past 20 years nearly half a billion people had been lifted out of poverty and it was absolutely nothing to do with western aid; it was entirely down to China adopting capitalism.

You could argue that China has developed a strange hybrid version of capitalism:

It is an unconventional homegrown success, failing to follow any Western blueprint for how to be modern. It combines lack of property rights with free markets, Communist Party dictatorship with feedback on local public services, and municipal state enterprises with private ones. (p.310)

But that plays right into Easterly’s thesis, which is that each country has to work out its own way to economic success, precisely by not having identikit western models (à la World Bank and IMF) forced on them.

After China and India, Easterly gives us 3 or 4 page summaries of the success of Turkey, Botswana and, surprisingly, Chile. I quote his conclusion at length because it’s an important, succinct summary of his position.

The success of Japan, China, the East Asian Tigers, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile is turning into a comic relic the arrogance of the West. Americans and Western Europeans will one day realise that they are not, after all, the saviours of ‘the Rest.’

Even when the West fails to ‘develop’ the Rest, the Rest develops itself. The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West only when it suits the Rest to do so.

Again, the success stories do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success. But we have seen in chapter 3 that creating free markets is itself difficult, and the success stories certainly don’t all fit some pristine laissez-faire ideal.

We know that gross violations of free markets and brutal self-aggrandizing autocrats usually preclude success. Beyond that breathtakingly obvious point, there is no automatic formula for success, only many political and economic Searchers looking for piecemeal improvements that overcome the many obstacles described in chapters 3 and 4.

Bottom-up, diverse, culture-specific, exploratory, open-minded, experimental, market-driven, are the characteristics of economic success in developing countries. Piecemeal solutions to defined problems. NOT the top-down, highly planned, centralised, vague and unspecific utopian visions of western aid donors.

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging. Discard your patronising confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries, or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naive institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

Aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development based on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that. Shorn of the impossible task of general economic development, aid can achieve much more than it is achieving now to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

He then gives examples of ground-up, localised interventions which have improved the lives of poor people, especially children, in Mexico, Kenya and India. He does a survey of small-scale interventions and also new methods of evaluation which he thinks could be replicated. Then a list of 6 basic principles which, again, I quote in their entirety so as to share the ideas and knowledge:

1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
3. Experiment, based on the results of the search.
4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

And a restatement of his core position:

Aid won’t make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. Isn’t that enough?

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Since the turn of the century inequality has increased in all western countries, as the rich get richer, public services collapse, and the middle and working classes get poorer.

• Poverty in the UK

If we cannot ‘abolish poverty’ in our own countries, what kind of deluded hubris makes us think we can solve it in countries completely unlike ours, with wildly different cultures and traditions?

The fallacy is to assume that because I have studied and lived in a society that somehow wound up with prosperity and peace, I know enough to plan for other societies to have prosperity and peace.

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else.

The rules that make markets work reflect a complex bottom-up search for social norms, networks of relationships, and formal laws and institutions that have the most payoff.

To make things worse, these norms, networks, and institutions change in response to changed circumstances and their own past history. Political philosophers such as Burke, Popper, and Hayek had the key insight that this social interplay was so complex that a top-down reform that tried to change all the rules at once could make things worse rather than better.

In the section titled ‘You can’t plan a market’, he writes:

Introducing free markets from the top down is not so simple. It overlooks the long sequence of choices, institutions, and innovations that have allowed free markets to develop in the rich Western economies.

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change…Planners underestimated how difficult it is to get markets working in a socially beneficial way.

But, as Easterly indicates, the arrogance never stops, and each new generation of politicians wants to strut and swank upon the world stage, and pledge billions to ‘aid’ and ‘poverty reduction’, commissioning the same kinds of Grand Plan, which will spend hundreds of millions on western consultants and experts and advisers and banks and planners with, in the end, little or no permanent effect on most of the inhabitants of the poorest countries.

Conclusion about the book

It might be 15 years old but ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is like an encyclopedia of ideas and arguments, every page exploding with explanations and concepts told in a clear, punchy, often humorous style. It’s hugely enjoyable and massively enlightening.

Thoughts about the West

Easterly’s book, written in 2004 and 2005, comes from a position of confident superiority – I mean it takes for granted that the West is rich and has an obligation to sort out ‘the Rest’ i.e. the Third World, the developing world or the Global South, whatever the latest term is for the poorest countries.

But nearly 20 years later it feels to me like the whole picture has changed. I can’t speak for America but the fact that Donald Trump might be re-elected president tells you all you need to know about the state of its ‘democracy’ and its deeply divided society.

But as for the country I live in, Britain no longer feels like a rich country. For thirteen years it has been mismanaged by a Conservative party in thrall to the neoliberal mirage that Britain can ever be like America, that – if only the state could be reduced to a bare minimum, all state-provided services slashed to the bone, personal and corporate taxes significantly cut – then the British people’s inner capitalist would be set free, Free Enterprise would flourish and Britain would become a high-education, high-tech, 21st century economy like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

In pursuit of this grandiose delusion the Conservative Party has undermined all Britain’s social services,  sold off our utilities, privatised state industries, making Britain a poorer, dirtier, more polluted and miserable place for most of its inhabitants to live in, with most public services on the verge of collapse (English town halls face unprecedented rise in bankruptcies, council leaders warn).

Easterly takes it for granted that the West is rich and will continue to be rich, and is democratic and will continue to be democratic, so that we can continue to intervene in other countries from a position of stable superiority. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Easterly’s book amounts to a long list of all the elements which need to be in place to secure wealth and democracy and, the longer the list went on, the more nervous I became about its viability. Democracy seems so unnatural, so against human nature, requires such a concerted effort to maintain and, in the 15 years since the book was published, so many forces have arisen, within western countries themselves and her enemies abroad (Russia, to some extent China), which seek to actively undermine it, not least the forces of the authoritarian, nationalist right.

And then there’s global warming. Severe weather conditions are coming which threaten to permanently damage food and water supplies, make parts of the planet uninhabitable and uproot billions.

The net effect of this book was to terrify me at the fragility and uncertainty of western wealth and democracy. What if Vladimir Putin is correct and liberal democracy is doomed? Personally, I don’t think  he is, Putin said that for propaganda effect. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that liberal democracy is in trouble. Easterly’s book is nominally about our obligation to save the poorest countries in the world. But what if we can’t even save ourselves?

Credit

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly was published by Penguin Books in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Oxford University Press paperback.

Related links

• The White Man’s Burden online
• World Bank country reports

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