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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.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Acting Out the Burden”
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats”
Aid agencies cannot cater to the poor, and many of well-intentioned initiatives go unchecked because the “central problem is that the poor are orphans: they have no money or political voice to communicate their needs to motivate others to meet those needs” (167). Since the aid agencies receive little feedback, if any, from the poor, and “[r]ich-country politicians control foreign aid agencies” (169), this proves to be a conundrum.
Suppliers survive only by finding what a consumer wants and satisfying their need, but aid does not work in that manner. Instead, Easterly explains, the reasons aid agencies fail to address the needs of the poor can be seen through the principal-agent analysis, where the agent acts on behalf of the principle. Rich-country politicians are the principals, while aid agencies are the agents. The issue with this relationship is that the poor should be the customers or the principal, not the rich Planners. However, due to the current setup, “[t]he agency must indulge the dreams of the rich-country principals of transforming the Rest” (170). Therefore, the aid agencies’ constraints lead to weak incentives to perform for the poor, and the efforts go unnoticed.
Despite these issues, foreign aid has made some notable contributions in areas of water, sanitation, education, and health. However, most aid efforts do not find their way in fostering the climate for success or creating opportunities to empower the poor. According to Easterly, “The lack of scientific approach to evaluating actions in the bureaucracies may also reflect lack of accountability.” To address the problem, Easterly suggests that the IMF and World Bank also evaluate their own agencies with “tangible, measurable goals” (179), and even if this proves difficult to the vast scale of its initiatives, aid agencies can also be “individually responsible for what their own programs achieve, not global goals” (205). The right step, Easterly believes 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” (206) because, so far, directing the poor on what has to be done has not worked.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Bailing out the Poor”
In this chapter, Easterly discusses the role of the IMF as credit enforcers, applying financial discipline to poor countries. As enforcers, the IMF “get[s] countries to pay their bills and repay their creditors” (213). According to Easterly, the IMF is the most powerful Western agency that deals with poor countries’ finances. They provide short-term loans to countries that face monetary setbacks, and countries must follow the IMF stipulations to access these loans. Although in theory the IMF is meant to improve economic policies and governments’ ability to become financially stable, its involvement over the long term can be disastrous and ineffectual, resulting in issues like riots or total state collapse. For instance, the IMF has exhaustive conditions on loans but is not aware of the domestic political pressures or local contexts in these countries.
In the case of poverty reduction and growth facility loans, “the extremely long list of conditions the IMF attaches to its PRGF loans […] makes each loan an attempt to engineer paradise rather than do piece-meal reforms” (234); this has “done worse at promoting long-term development” (212).
The IMF, however, has experienced significant successes in South Korea and Thailand, as it brought them out of their financial ruts in the 1980s, after which they experienced rapid growth. Despite these triumphs, its “core function of enforcing financial discipline is flawed by an intrusive Planner’s mentality that sets arbitrary numerical targets for key indicators of government behavior” (214). Combined with this vagueness, Easterly believes that the problem is two-fold: “(1) inadequate knowledge of what is really happening on the ground, and (2) complexities that are not captured by the financial programming model” (221).
In an attempt to suggest solutions, Easterly argues the IMF should only consider short-term bailouts (particularly if they think loan repayment may not be possible), implement ways to minimize its dealings with poor countries, and stick to emerging economies instead of the poor while reassessing the conditions on their loans and lending mechanisms. However, for real contribution, they must “get rid of its intrusive and complex conditionality” (235) especially in cases that are volatile and unstable and return to its original mandate of financial stabilization rather than utopian planning.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy”
In this chapter, Easterly notes the successes of health interventions, such as the eradication of measles in southern Africa, the decrease of childhood deaths from diarrhea in Egypt, and the elimination of polio in Latin America. In contrast, Easterly describes the Western response to HIV/AIDS in Africa “as a tale of two decades of neglect, prevarication, incompetence, and passivity by all those same political actors and aid agencies” (239).
According to Easterly, the initial failures of AIDS relief included delayed action and a disinclination to take responsibility—a phenomenon known as Kitty Genovese effect, in which everyone expects someone else to respond to a crisis so they do not. Even with acknowledgement, the tragedy remains that aid agencies’ current strategy is economically inefficient and impractical, as the funding emphasizes treatment instead of prevention. Easterly notes, “A well-established public health principle is that you should save lives that are cheap to save before you save lives that are more expensive to save. That way you save many more lives using the scarce funds available” (251). Prevention is always cheaper than treatment, especially in regard to AIDS.
Easterly cites as evidence that “two and a half times as many Africans die from other preventable diseases as die from AIDS,” such as measles, childhood illnesses, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea (251), and it is the compassion that channels this money in a destructive way. Providing rough costs of various health interventions in Africa, he states that the cost of HIV/AIDS treatment per person in a year was $304, the most expensive compared to tuberculosis treatment, which cost $10 per case, and malarial drugs, costing $1. Easterly argues that the zeal for HIV/AIDS treatment is due to guilt surrounding the early responses to the HIV crisis, but he also points out that the approach to AIDS is used by politicians in rich countries as an example to their voters that “something is being done (SIBD)” (254). It is easier and more appealing to show a sick person being treated than methods employed to prevent the contraction of AIDS.
The success of prevention campaigns can be seen through examples like Thailand, which increased condom usage among prostitutes and reduced new HIV infections. Treatment is not only expensive, it be inaccessible for many of the sick to either strictly follow or procure, and the infected to face relapse if the regimen is missed. HIV medicines could also be sold on the black market. Therefore, Easterly asserts, “Spending AIDS money on treatment rather than on prevention makes the AIDS crisis worse, not better” (255).
Part 2 Analysis
Part 2 dissects the white man’s burden from an economic perspective and shows the cracks in the current systems. For instance, a major theme here is exclusion of the poor in all levels of decision making, from the principal-agent relationship, in which the bureaucrats of rich countries control the aid agencies, to the goals of the agents, which are vague and unobservable. The absence of the poor in the discussions becomes the tragedy, as “the poor foreign aid recipients get some things they never wanted, and don’t get things they urgently need” (169).
Therefore, much of the grander issues of foreign aid has little to do with the poor and instead has to do with power. Those that control the money can push their own interests and in essence influence situations to their accordance, as can been seen in the variations of national aid agencies. For example, USAID boldly admits to furthering the “foreign policy goals of the United States” (201). The United Kingdom’s aid agency DFID prefers to state its objective as assisting the poor, but they are in control of who gets the money and for what reasons.
In all fairness, these aid agencies do attract professionals who are deeply committed to assisting the poor, but because they are often tasked with achieving overlapping goals and can be controlled by several principals with differing interests, they are forced to overachieve with minimal resources: “The aid agencies do a little bit on each goal, which forgoes the gains from specialization and leaves low-cost/high-benefit activities underfunded” (167).
To fill this gap, solutions arise from private sectors or through bottom-up channels. For instance, in India, a subsidiary of the multinational corporation Unilever worked with aid agencies, governments, NGOs, and other parties to promote their antibiotic soap to poor communities. Inadvertently, it became a product used to protect against diarrhea. However, sometimes nongovernmental aid organizations can perform better if recognized by the official aid agencies, such as in the case of WaterAid in Ethiopia, which received funding from these institutions. WaterAid brought clean water to poor villages in the Great Rift Valley through a project managed completely by Ethiopians, proving that money can reach the poor if used strategically and specifically. In doing so, the program overrode the cracks in the aid management systems.
