Warning: White Man's Burden takes a long, tough look at the why, what and how of international efforts with poverty.
The sobering subtitle: "Why the West's efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good."
The root: "The White Man's Burden emerged from the West's self-pleasing fantasy that 'we' were the chosen ones to save the Rest."
Crucial needs for success: Constant feedback from the poor and ongoing accountability to the poor.
Author William Easterly on effective and ineffective choices:
- "It hasn't worked to tell the poor what to do."
- "Let's call the advocates of the traditional approach the Planners, while we call the agents for change in the alternative approach the Searchers. "
- "A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve.
- "A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.
- "A Planner believe outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions and that most solutions must be homegrown."
- "The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer."
- "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."
- Individual accountability
- Search for what works locally
- Feasible actions that helps the poor lift themselves up
- Experiment
- Evaluate
- Invest in what's working, disinvest in what's not
More insights along the way:
- "Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so."
- "Aid agencies cannot end world poverty but they can do many useful things to meet the diverse needs of the poor and give them new opportunities."
- "The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top."
- "Westerners: Don't do things to or for other people without giving them a way to let you know–and hold you accountable for what you have actually done to or for them."
- "Even though the biggest payoff comes from local Searchers who solve their own problems, Searchers from the rich West can do good, specific things for poor people."
- A Sir Francis Bacon quote: "So it cometh often to pass, that mean and small things discover great better than great can discover small."
- "How can top-down Planners make markets work when it requires understanding not just free markets but also the bottom-up search for the social norms, producer and consumer networks, and kin relationships that facilitate exchange."
- "Colonial officials suffered from all the same problems that characterize today's White Man's Burden: excessive self confidence of bureaucrats, coercive top-down planning, desultory knowledge of local conditions, and little feedback from the locals on what worked."
- "....make known your dissatisfaction with Planners and call for more Searchers."
Recommended.
