The Man Without a Plan

"Be thine own palace," wrote John Donne, "or the world's thy jail." William Easterly does not invoke this particular metaphor in The White Man's Burden, but this exciting -- and excited -- book is about the imprisonment of the world's poor in the trap of international aid, where "planners" have incarcerated the wretched of the earth. The poor may not have a "palace" to fall back on, battered as they are by grinding privation, massive illiteracy, and the scourge of epidemics. But Easterly -- a former World Bank economist who now teaches at New York University -- nevertheless argues that in the fight against global poverty, "the right plan is to have no plan."

In contrast to the typically well-meaning but allegedly always injurious "planners," the heroes of Easterly's book are those whom he calls "searchers." The division between the planners and the searchers, as seen by Easterly, could not be sharper: "In foreign aid, 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 whether the customer is satisfied." The radical oversimplification in this overdrawn contrast leads Easterly to a simple summary of his book's thesis in its subtitle -- Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good -- which supplements a title borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's lyrical paean to high-minded imperialism.

As it happens, the empirical picture of the actual effects of international aid (which, incidentally, does not come only from white men, since Japan is a major participant in the effort) is far more complex than Easterly's shotgun summary suggests. Nor is Easterly particularly fair in describing what the leaders whom he identifies as well-intentioned doers of great harm (including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, British Chancellor Gordon Brown, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn) actually propose and sometimes achieve. Nor is he persuasive in his use of isolated quotations to indicate how the world is supposedly being misled by The New York Times, The Economist, and The New Yorker when they argue, as one of their writers, John Cassidy of The New Yorker, put it, that "aid can be effective in any country where it is accompanied by sensible economic policies."

All of this is a great pity, since Easterly's book offers a line of analysis that could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the literature on economic development. The wide-ranging and rich evidence -- both anecdotal and statistical -- that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration. In a less extreme form, they could have yielded an illuminating critical perspective on how and why things often do go wrong in the global efforts to help the world's poor.

Unfortunately, Easterly gets swept up by the intoxicating power of purple prose (I could not avoid recollecting Kipling's description of words as "the most powerful drug used by mankind"). He forgoes the opportunity for a much-needed dialogue, opting instead for a rhetorical drubbing of those whom he sees as well-intentioned enemies of the poor.

JUST SO STORIES

Empirical evidence of the ineffectiveness of many grand development and poverty-alleviation schemes is undoubtedly worth discussing clearly and honestly, as Easterly does when he is not too busy looking for an aphorism so crushing that it will leave his targets gasping for breath. And Easterly is also right to note that the failure of many grand schemes results from their disregard for the complexity of institutions and incentive systems and their neglect of individual initiative, which must be societally encouraged rather than bureaucratically stifled. All of this may not yield Easterly's overblown conclusions; in fact, even he acknowledges the success of many international aid efforts, from the dissemination of deworming drugs and the use of oral rehydration therapy for diarrheal diseases to indoor spraying to control malaria and several programs to slow down the spread of AIDS. But all of the failures he does cite should encourage the type of scrutiny that can help translate good intentions into effective results.

The challenge is to respond to the plight of the hopelessly impoverished without neglecting to insist that help come in useful and productive forms.

In fact, Easterly makes exactly that point once the blast of rhetoric is turned down: "The good news about the noisy anti-globalization protesters, the hard-working NGOs, the rock bands and the movie stars, and the rich-country governments' increased interest in the Rest coming after 9/11 is that the constituency for the poor is growing. It's time for the rich-country public to insist that aid money actually reach the poor." Although not coming until after page 200, those sentences provide a better summary of the contribution of The White Man's Burden than do the rather extreme slogans to which Easterly chooses to give pride of place.