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.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “The Future”
Chapter 10 Summary: Homegrown Development
Easterly believes in the possibilities brought by homegrown development and focuses on the examples of Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile. According to Easterly, “it is easier to search for solutions to your own problems than those of others” (345). Easterly uses success stories from different countries that received little foreign aid and did not spend a lot of time in IMF programs. He argues that the West played a small part in the success stories of some of these countries and uses Singapore and Hong Kong, ex-British colonies, as examples of regions that experienced more stability and growth. He writes, “What is unique about these two colonies is that they were unoccupied territories that the British colonized with the permission (or coercion) of the nearby local rulers. […] The British also left the Chinese communities free to pursue their incomprehensible customs and more or less govern themselves, only intervening if social upheaval threatened” (348). As a result, Hong Kong and Singapore had their own autonomy.
China epitomizes the ability of a poor nation that spurred itself “into an economic powerhouse that scares the Chinese-made underpants off Western companies and other poor countries alike” (354). Easterly links this success to unconventional homegrown strategies that fail to follow traditional Western pathways. However, he notes that the lack of democracy and inefficiencies caused by state-owned enterprises and issues with the banking system are worrisome despite China’s amazing boom. From the success stories, Easterly contends that even as the West fails to “develop” the Rest, the Rest develops itself through self-reliance and the borrowing ideas of from the West. He states, “The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West when it suits the Rest to do so” (363). Therefore, the successful nations improvise with what they have and what they have learned from the West to implement strategies that are conducive to their own local contexts.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Future of Western Assistance”
From the beginning of the book, Easterly recommends getting rid of the utopian goals and argues that “[t]he aim should be to make individuals better off, not transform government or societies. Once the West is willing to aid individuals rather than governments, some conundrums that tie foreign aid up in knits are resolved” (368). According to him, aid should “[p]ut the focus back where it belongs; get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the roads, water pipes, textbooks, and nurses” (369). Easterly argues that providing such things to the poor will not make the poor dependent on handouts but will provide the poorest people with health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that can better their lives.
He believes that individual responsibility in this section, believing it will ensure that aid agencies are answerable to their actions and incorporate evaluation of their efforts. Easterly states that Searchers should shift the incentive system of collective responsibility for multiple goals to individual responsibility for individual tasks. He argues that aid agencies should specialize in sectors and countries they are experts in. Specialization would result in a significant shift in multilateral agencies; this way they can transfer power from Planners to Searchers and will be focused on specific tasks.
Easterly points to Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi, two researchers who “suggest a marketplace instead of central planning, a kind of eBay meets foreign aid” with three types of actors: “(1) social entrepreneurs close to the poor who propose projects that meets their needs; (2) individuals and institutions with technical and practical knowledge, and (3) donors who have funds they want to give away” (376). According to Easterly, this is a decentralized approach that would eliminate the coordination problems as it would avoid manipulation of aid by donor governments and the corruption in recipient governments. Easterly also touches on various innovative ideas such as vouchers and conditional cash transfers and suggests that “one idea that is too quickly dismissed is for foreign aid to just give cash grants targeted to the poorest people. This would be the purest solution to letting the poor choose for themselves what they needed” (380). Easterly sums up the chapter by urging that all of us can become Searchers to truly aid the poor.
Part 4 Analysis
After looking at the past in Part 3, Easterly reflects on the probable answers for the future in Part 4, suggesting he still somewhat believes aid agencies to be useful. Although he disparages the state of aid and the cycles of disaster caused by the white man’s burden, he points out that all is not bleak if the West humbly accepts that the locals are capable of searching for their own solutions and making their own paths toward economic and political growth through homegrown methods. For example, India found its success through outsourcing IT services for the U.S. market and Botswana partnered with De Beers for mining and marketing their diamond resources, which led to economic growth “at the world’s fastest rate over the last four decades” (360).
He believes aid can work if it is used for piecemeal reforms rather than mindless funneling toward utopian goals. Effective aid requires a mindset change for official aid agencies, the West, and the Planners. In other words, aid needs to be more than a dispersal of money but an outlining of the problem and a creation of corresponding solutions. For this, he pushes an entrepreneurial approach in which aid agents are fully accountable for specific actions, create a prototype, experiment or test that prototype, and finally, evaluate the feedback received until the project is successful.
Although aid can be helpful, it is only one support to assist the poor and not the main route. Perhaps the best way to remedy the issues of aid is to see poverty not as an idealist goal but as the individual stories of people’s daily struggles. Like Easterly’s example of an Ethiopian preteen who missed school to carry firewood—for aid to be effective, there must be a specific problem it solves.
