The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

“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 and occupation show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in the Rest.” 

Leaders of the West are not immune to the strength of idealism and its staunch supporters, especially if it furthers their agenda. Throughout history, whenever a nation has provided a reasoning to intervene in another country, it is from a standpoint of making a superficial and self-serving change without taking into account the complexities of the local region. 

“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.” 

Prior to World War II, colonialism tried to justify its actions as an effort to better other peoples; afterward, foreign aid from the West became that mechanism. Although the overt racism and economic plundering began to diminish, it was replaced with the hubris of being a savior for the other. The West may change their rhetoric, but the meaning still expresses the need to exert authority and power.

“Many things have changed since the 1950s—we now have air-conditioning, the Internet, new life-saving drugs, and sex in movies. Yet one thing is unchanged: the legend that inspired foreign aid in the 1950s is the same legend that inspires foreign aid today.” 

As Easterly points out, the basis of foreign aid is still grounded in the belief that the poor cannot function or solve their own plight without help from wealthy nations. Despite the many advancements and evidence, there is a disregard for the solutions that the poor can provide for their own countries. This is what causes much of the assumptions and failures of foreign aid.

“One of the main things that social institutions and norms must do is find ways to prevent market participants from ‘opportunistic behavior,’ more commonly known as ‘cheating.’”

Although Easterly supports the free market, he does caution that it is not without its flaws, particularly if not matched to the circumstances of the local environment or if regular feedback and accountability loops are missing. He gives, as examples, the case of selling poor quality tacos in unsanitary conditions in Mexico, credit markets in which borrowers have no incentive to pay back loans unless compelled by the lender, and even the act of a supplier extorting additional payment by taking advantage of a client’s situation. 

“Individuals are dynamic, yet the complex interactions of individuals in society can cause stagnant economies.” 

The success stories of bottom-up market initiatives show how individuals can affect their respective economies, such as the Nigerian filmmaker Ken Nnebue, who sent his film directly to video and launched the Nigerian movie industry, or entrepreneur Alieu Conteh, who built the first cellular network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, if individuals are solely focused on their own sustenance within the guidelines of their respective economies, which is a legitimate concern, they can do nothing or have very little effect in generating their economies out of stagnation.

“You need just the right amount of protection for the rich under democracy: too little, and the elite won’t want to agree to democracy; too much, and the poor will go ahead and have the revolution anyway.” 

In regard to democracy and oligarchy, political scientist James A. Robinson notes that a democracy is created through a contest between the rich and poor in which the rich do not prefer democracy due to the redistribution of wealth—however, it is a better option than the threat of a revolution brought by the poor majority. So, even if the rich minority agrees, they will not choose a democracy against their own safety, and the poor will not bear to live in a democracy that blindly safeguards the rich; therefore, a balance must exist to please both parties and prevent chaos. 

“For the rest: let political leaders and social activists in the West expose and denounce tyranny in the Rest, but don’t expect Western governments or aid agencies to change bad governments into good ones.”

Although Easterly is critical of the West’s approach West and their aid agencies, he does realize the importance of the West in calling out severe injustices or problems in the Rest. However, he is against the Western interventions promising to change political systems and warns the Rest not to have any expectations from the West, as it is improbable and often destructive for an outsider to make lasting or significant change. 

“When nobody can tell whether aid agency efforts make a difference, the aid agency managers have only weak incentives to exert effort. This goes back to one of the key predictions of this book: visibility gives more power to Searchers, while invisibility shifts power to Planners.” 

Easterly argues that the Planners are ineffective due to their ideals of transforming the Rest, and many times aid agencies are pressured to live up to these impossible conditions. Also, without any systems for accountability, measurement, evaluation, and other items to monitor aid initiatives, agencies do not have the appropriate reasons to succeed at helping the intended. When there are none to witness, failure is imminent. Therefore, Searchers experience triumph because their actions are seen to the community they are serving.

“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 we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less 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.” 

The shift from Planner to Searcher mentality can come if and when bureaucrats adhere to tangible processes and achieve results that show a relationship to defined goals. For the aid agencies and their actors, performance can immediately be transformed if these factors are put in place, thereby funneling resources effectively. 

“A piecemeal, visible, and individually accountable outcome, such as clean water for a village, is more likely to be addressed by Searchers, while a general, invisible, and unaccountable outcome, like a contribution to economic growth, is more likely to be addressed by Planners.” 

Easterly is a proponent of the Searcher mentality, and he attributes their success to seeking a solution to a specific problem, testing and experimenting their product or solution, and being accountable to their customers. Through this cycle, they facilitate the appropriate results which allow them to fare better on the ground than the Planners.

“Aid bureaucracies are like my children, who, when asked to choose between a chocolate bar and ice cream when they were young, would say ‘both.’” 

An argument reiterated in the book is that aid agencies and the overall Planner approach is inefficient due to vague goals and thinly spread resources. Because agencies do not tackle one goal and instead try to work on all goals, they fail to use their resources constructively. They exhaust themselves. In addition, without any specialization in the completion of one goal, they are left with no priorities met. 

“The most important suggestion is to search for small improvements, then brutally scrutinize and test whether the poor got what they wanted and were better off, and then repeat the process.” 

Easterly notes that because the poor have little access, they cannot hold the agencies accountable. Therefore, it is up to the agencies to allow for that access or, at least, not tell the poor what to do. Instead, they should provide the poor with autonomy to decide for themselves. As an example, the PROGRESA program in Mexico gives cash and other incentives to parents who keep their children in school, as does the Food for Education program in Bangladesh when parents allow their daughters to go to school. 

“Getting people to use soap is not as easy as it sounds.” 

In the Chapter 5 Snapshot: “Private Firms Help the Poor in India,” Easterly depicts how a subsidiary of Unilever in India marketed their antibacterial soap in a way that relates to a common yet deadly local problem: diarrhea. Working with aid agencies and NGOs, they were able to build a relationship with the poor that increased their sales and created trust in their product. 

“There is an association between IMF involvement and the most extreme political event: total state collapse.” 

Through data, Easterly shows that a country spending more time under an IMF program is at a high risk for national chaos or total state collapse. For instance, Sierra Leone slipped into a tragic civil war after their dependency on the IMF, which did nothing to improve the infrastructure with their loans. In the long-term, the organization did more damage. 

“Nobody knows what an ‘other items, net’ is or where it will wake up tomorrow morning.” 

The IMF’s financial programming model is unreliable, with conditions that hinder countries’ ability to repay loans, or does not provide the IMF accountability through their financial statements. As an example, the Turkey central bank accounts listed an obscure expense as “other items, net,” which balances the assets and liabilities but does not show what exactly was done with the loan money. This lack of clarity is the grounds for the IMF’s failures.

“The failure of debt relief to spur growth was a problem because the failure of the original loans to spur growth was what had caused the debt problem in the first place.” 

As Easterly notes, the repeated lending did nothing to assist countries in repaying the debt but rather made them much worse off as the debt accrued. Despite debt forgiveness programs, the countries became more dependent or failed to reach the optimistic growth targets set by the IMF and the World Bank. In addition, with debts being forgiven, the countries had little incentive to bail themselves out. 

“Each of the thirty-eight people might have been willing to bear this cost to save Kitty’s life, but preferred that someone else make the call. With so many witnesses to the scene, each person calculated a high probability that someone else would make the call and save Kitty. Therefore, each person did nothing.” 

Kitty Genovese was brutally murdered in an apartment near her home, and it was initially believed that the neighbors did nothing despite hearing her scream. Though this aspect was later disproven, the Genovese syndrome, or bystander effect, is a real sociological phenomenon in which bystanders fail to act because they assume someone else will. Easterly says this effect also operates within aid bureaucracies, where all departments try to shift responsibility to another department especially if the task appears difficult.

“The only way to stop the threat [of AIDS] to Africans and others is prevention, no matter how unappealing the politics or how uncomfortable the discussion about sex. The task is to save the next generation before it is again too late.” 

The current crisis in AIDS is the lack of expenditure on prevention as many are uncomfortable talking about it and prefer treatment. However, because treatment is costly and aid resources are limited, prevention is best course of action.

“Like today’s donors and postmodern imperialists, the colonizers were outside Planners who could never know the reality on the ground. Like their modern-day counterparts, colonizers often unwittingly destabilized the balance of internal power.” 

The current Planner mentality has been in existence since the colonial times, during which colonizers would take upon themselves the duty of educating non-Whites in Western customs and mannerisms without regard for how their presence may affect the local context in the long-run. 

“Savimbi was to democracy what Paris Hilton is to chastity.” 

The Reagan administration supported the cruel Angolan leader Jonas Savimbi with aid in their fight against Soviet-allied regimes as part of the “Reagan Doctrine.” However, Savimbi was far from democratic. His reign spread terror through murder, kidnapping, and famine as weapons of war.

“The best rule of all for Western helpers is, first, do no harm.” 

Historically, Western military interventions have never resulted in good for poor countries, often destabilizing them economically and politically. Therefore, Easterly believes that for the West to be helpful, they must stay away from involvement. 

“Success attracts paternity claims.”

The World Bank likes to take credit for countries that were extremely economically successful, such as China. However, in reality, China saved itself by rebranding itself as an economic powerhouse and saved its own poor. 

“Americans and Western Europeans will one day realize that they are not, after all, the saviors of the Rest.” 

Despite a history of witnessing the consequences of Western involvement, the West still refuses to believe that developing countries have it within them to discover their own solutions.