35 pages • 1 hour read
William EasterlyThe White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The White Man’s Burden
For Easterly, the white man’s burden is a relic that haunts the actions of Western assistance and foreign aid agencies—and a basis for the Planner mentality that charges forward with “all the pretensions of utopian social engineering” (15). This approach fails because it reeks of the past “[w]hite imperial benevolence [which] was a strong staple of propaganda back home to justify the colonies” (278), and which sustains itself on grandiose utopian goals.
In addition, the concept of white man’s burden is antithetical in nature. Easterly outlines that one cannot include all of the following: “(1) the White Man’s Burden is acting in the interests of the poor in the Rest; (2) the White Man’s Burden is effective at resolving poor people’s problems; and (3) lots of bad things, whose prevention was affordable, are happening to poor people. If (3) happens, then either (1) or (2) must not hold.” For Easterly, the disappointment of the white man’s burden is that it refuses to see itself as “visible policy with visible dollars meant to help visible people” (240), and therefore it results in unproductive measures.
The Poor
The goal of foreign aid, at least in the book, is to serve the needs of the poor. Tellingly, the slogan of the World Bank is “Our Dream Is a World Free of Poverty,” summing up the intentions in the development sector. However, the poor exist as a vague afterthought, and there is a tragedy behind this quixotic goal: “Poor people die not only because of the world’s indifference to their poverty, but also because of ineffective efforts by those who do care” (7).
The efforts to eradicate poverty and save the poor have not only been futile but have led to an increase in other problems whether that be the approach to the AIDS crisis or the lack of incorporating the poor in the decision-making process. Easterly’s “Snapshots” show what the poor really need and how they solve their own problems—and it has nothing to do with what the West or aid agencies think they need.
Money
In the book, it is the forms of money that have tremendous power, particularly as foreign aid. If misused, it has the potential for death and disaster. Easterly considers it one of his two tragedies, stating that “the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths” (4). In regard to World Bank loans, he mentions how they are notorious for their conditions and difficult to repayment—, countries that depend heavily on them are subject to total state collapse, among other dismal probabilities such as riots or wars. Money can be useful but not if it begets turmoil. This is an important element in Easterly’s argument—therefore, in Part 4, to avoid that cycle, he lays out the optimistic path that money or aid can take for the actual benefit of the poor.
