The Man Without a Plan

Those slogans also give the misleading impression that Easterly is against efforts to help the poor altogether, preferring to leave them to rely on their own devices and their own "search" for ways of making things better through unaided individual efforts. The hardheadedness of his bombardment of "do-gooders" can be read -- wrongly -- as a general skepticism toward the idea that one person can consciously and deliberately do good to another. This is not Easterly's actual position at all. He clearly knows how appalling the lives of the poor of the world are, and his sympathy for them is manifest throughout the book. In Easterly's rejection of plans to aid developing countries, there is nothing of the false ethics that finds frequent expression in the anti-aid attitudes of those who argue, whether explicitly or implicitly, that the affluent have no moral responsibility to help the wretched, because their problems were not caused by the rich. Nor does he show any sympathy for the growing tendency to blame the predicament of the poor on the basic deficiencies and hard-to-reform nature of their own regressive cultures, which supposedly make it quite futile to try to help them. In contrast to those who make this case -- under the apparently benign slogan "culture matters" -- Easterly has faith in the creativity of all.

Furthermore, Easterly's critique is not confined to foreign aid as it is usually defined; it is a critique of all grand plans to save the world hatched in Washington or London or Paris. Market ideologues may love the battering that large-scale state intervention receives through Easterly's hard-hitting prose. But they will be less happy with his carefully spelled-out skepticism of schemes for the immediate replacement of all economic institutions with a pure market system. Easterly is particularly critical of the reasoning behind programs that go by the name of "shock therapy" -- plans to jump-start a market economy by comprehensively dismantling all preexisting institutions. He also criticizes the growing tendency to advocate an exclusive reliance on capitalist property rights, which often end up replacing old societal arrangements that, among other things, play an important part in mitigating problems of "shared commons." Although Easterly recognizes the importance of a market system with good property rights, he looks for its nurtured emergence in a qualified form -- rather than its drastic imposition on bemused recipients by befuddled "planners of markets."

Although a great champion of democracy, Easterly is also deeply critical of the majestic pretensions of a handful of world leaders who think they can impose democracy on other countries they know little about. The continuing debacle in Iraq affirms his general critique of grand plans. Easterly presents a similarly effective critique of the recent spell of imperial nostalgia -- a temptation to save the world by filling the void left by the decline of old empires with the activism of a new American one. Here he comes closest to responding to Kipling's exhortation:

Take up the White Man's burden --

The savage wars of peace --

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease.

Easterly writes, "Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, whose work on every topic but this I greatly admire, says 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.'" Easterly's skepticism of the benefits of such "liberal imperialism" is well presented. It could be supplemented by noting that there were big famines in India -- the subject of Kipling's eloquent phrase -- until the very end of the British imperial rule. The last one, the Bengal famine of 1943, killed between two million and three million people four years before Indian independence. Since the end of the Raj and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy, there has not been a single one.

PLAIN TALES

Despite the simplicity of its subtitle, Easterly's book is concerned with a much wider range of problems than just the pros and cons of aid. He is moved by a rich vision of indigenous creativity that can flower in the absence of extraterritorial grand designs. This vision informs and inspires his general approach and leads him to a number of empirical exercises -- which are interesting but not quite unproblematic. To arrive at his negative view of economic aid, Easterly draws on large-scale cross-sectional statistical analysis, as well as on case studies of particular plans and programs. Such intercountry comparisons have become fashionable as a way of isolating solid connections between causes and effects, but they are seriously compromised by the difficulty of comparing diverse experiences: countries can differ significantly in variables other than those that are brought under cross-sectional scrutiny.

Many such studies are also impaired by difficulties in identifying what is causing what. For example, a country's economic distress may induce donors to give it more aid -- which may, in terms of associative statistics, suggest a connection between aid and bad economic performance. But using such a correlation to prove the bad effects of aid turns the causal connection on its head. Easterly tries to avoid such pitfalls, but the statistical associations on which he draws for his comprehensive pessimism about the effects of aid do not offer a definitive causal picture.