In The White Man’s Burden, economist, New York University professor, and Brookings Institution senior fellow William Easterly argues that the global humanitarian aid system is fundamentally flawed. His main critique is that the international aid system prioritizes top-down, centralized, and tightly directed aid distribution—all controlled by rich countries far from the developing world they mean to serve. Because the aid community is so disconnected, it creates big plans and sweeping missions completely unsuited for the reality on the ground, overlooks local concerns, and rarely holds itself accountable.
Specifically, Easterly argues that:
In this guide, we don’t cover some of the more discursive and tangential sections of The White Man’s Burden—including some of Easterly’s long historical recaps of various Western colonial enterprises in Africa and the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, lengthy descriptions of statistical methodology, and outdated case studies. In addition, we have incorporated commentary from outside sources to update some of Easterly’s statistics (since the book was published in 2006), supplement his ideas with more recent examples, and incorporate alternative or opposing viewpoints.
Criticism and Praise for The White Man’s Burden
The White Man’s Burden builds upon themes and topics that Easterly explored in his 2001 book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, in which he criticized the global economic development community for its failure to understand the importance of economic incentives in its policy and program design. That pointed critique, incidentally, helped get him fired from his position as a senior adviser in the development group at the World Bank.
Contemporary reviews of The White Man’s Burden celebrated the book for its boldness in questioning the conventional wisdom on foreign aid and international economic development and praised Easterly for bringing attention to the inadequacies of the prevailing foreign aid model. In particular, contemporaries found merit in Easterly’s argument that even the most well-intentioned philanthropy seldom achieves its desired goals—and often ends up diverting resources to nefarious actors. They also praised Easterly’s somewhat counterintuitive argument that capitalism, entrepreneurship, and the profit motive are often better engines of social progress in developing countries than direct aid—a view at odds with those of many in the global development community, including Jeffrey Sachs, Easterly’s longtime ideological rival.
Some reviewers did criticize the book for what they saw as its muddled and lengthy detours into political science, as well as Easterly’s shaky analysis of the legacy of British and French colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Other critics noted that Easterly’s approach is more effective at pointing out problems than it is at identifying solutions—in particular, noting his failure to discuss what, precisely, enabled countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Estonia to successfully transition to free-market liberal democracy, while efforts to bring this about in other countries (most notably Russia) failed.
Easterly argues that, however well-intentioned, efforts undertaken by the world’s wealthy countries to aid the global poor have had a dismal track record.
According to Easterly, the $2.3 trillion in aid that Western governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) distributed to the developing world from the 1950s through 2006 (when The White Man’s Burden was published) has had almost zero effect on global poverty, mortality rates, or overall quality of life.
To Easterly, this is evidence of one thing—the global humanitarian aid system is fundamentally flawed.
The Refugee Crisis and the Humanitarian System
These criticisms have only gotten stronger since the book was published in 2006. In a 2017 paper, Paul Spiegel, a former top official at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), argues that the existing humanitarian aid system is no longer suited to deal with the problems of the 21st century—especially the global refugee crisis that has seen over 65 million people around the world forcibly displaced from their homes due to conflict and environmental disasters resulting from climate change.
Spiegel contends that the aid system was created during a time in global history when conflicts were more localized and shorter in duration, meaning that refugees and displaced persons were mostly a temporary phenomenon. Thus, a “Band-Aid” approach was appropriate, one that would help people address their most pressing needs on a temporary basis.
But today’s conflicts are wide-ranging, more violent, and decades in duration, making the existing aid model wholly unsuited for the present moment. Spiegel recommends having the major aid organizations, like the World Health Organization and the UN, cede some of their power to national governments to let them more flexibly deal with the refugee crisis on their own borders.
Easterly attributes the failure to misguided ideas within the aid community about how best to help the global poor.
The aid community, he writes, prioritizes top-down, centralized, and tightly directed aid distribution—all controlled by rich countries (primarily the United States and Western Europe), far from the developing world they mean to serve.
Because the aid community is so disconnected, it creates ambitious, unrealistic plans, overlooks local concerns, and rarely holds itself accountable for its failures.
All in all, Easterly writes, it’s a recipe for overpromising and under-delivering.
Notable Foreign Aid Successes
Although Easterly’s general critique throughout The White Man’s Burden is that the foreign aid community produces lackluster results due to its unwieldy structure and distance from the countries and people it is meant to serve, it’s worth looking at the extraordinary strides that have been made through global humanitarian and development aid.
According to the Brookings Institution:
Extreme poverty (defined as subsisting on less than $1.90 per day) has fallen from 1.9 billion people (36% of the global population) in 1990 to 592 million (8%) in 2019.
Maternal, infant, and child mortality rates have dropped by half.
Once-endemic diseases like smallpox and polio have been all but eradicated, while deaths from malaria have dropped by half since the dawn of the 21st century.
Life expectancy around the world rose from 65 years in 1990 to 72 in 2017.
Easterly argues that the West’s traditional top-down approach is inherently undemocratic, imposes utopian social engineering schemes on people who don’t want them and didn’t ask for them, and often exacerbates the problems it’s supposed to solve.
Worse, the top-down model is highly reminiscent of the 19th-century colonial “civilizing mission”—the impetus for the original “white man’s burden,” made famous by Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem of the same name, which celebrated European and American imperialism. The imperialists of this era believed that they had a moral duty to bring what they saw as the virtues of European civilization—such as free markets, Christianity, and industry—to “backward” parts of the world (chiefly in Africa and Asia).
In reality, these imperialist projects left behind a dubious legacy in the colonized countries—including economic exploitation and forced labor (with the global slave market being the most extreme example); deliberate exacerbation of ethnic tensions; empowerment of local authoritarians; imposition of arbitrary borders that bore no relation to the ethnic, linguistic, or religious makeup of the territory; and political chaos and civil war.
Defending the Imperial Legacy
Some writers today defend the record of the great European empires like the British Empire. One commentator argues that the British Empire fostered stability, peace, and economic progress in regions that had historically been wracked by poverty and ethnic, tribal, and sectarian violence. Going a step further, scholars like Niall Ferguson write that the British Empire was the engine that enabled the globalization and economic expansion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a notable progress for humanity before it was interrupted by the two world wars and Great Depression of the 20th century.
Other writers argue that the ancient empires of Rome, Persia, Mauryan India, and Han China all succeeded in bringing together disparate ethnic and religious groups, affording some measure of protection to persecuted minorities, and birthing a cosmopolitan blend of cultures that yielded some of the world’s greatest artistic, scientific, and literary achievements.
Indeed, Easterly writes, many of the problems in these countries today can be traced back to the legacy of expropriation and subjugation from the colonial era. And still, Easterly sees echoes of this paternalistic mentality in the actions of Western governments, private aid organizations, and bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. He argues that even more extreme manifestations of this neocolonial mentality can be seen in modern “nation-building” actions by the United States in its military invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The West may no longer justify its actions in such blatantly racist or ethnocentrist terms as their predecessors did, but they are still rooted in the same assumptions—namely, that rich white countries know what’s good for the rest of the world.
The Orientalist Legacy
A major ideological and intellectual component of the European imperial project was the school of thought known as Orientalism. In Orientalism, Edward Said writes that Orientalism has served as the framework through which Western writers, policymakers, and the general public have interpreted and defined the non-European societies of Asia—particularly the Islamic societies of the Middle East—as “the Orient." The central premise is that the Orient is a fundamentally different, exotic, dangerous, unchanging, and “other” place. This concept of a foreign and strange East forms a set of cultural, political, religious, and linguistic contrasts which, in turn, has enabled the West to think of itself as a distinct—and superior—entity.
Said writes that Orientalism served as a key ideological linchpin of European colonialism, with Orientalist tropes about Western superiority playing a major role in justifying and legitimating the growth of empire. Orientalist scholarship deeply influenced the actions of key historical figures like Napoleon, who saw themselves as contemporary exemplars of an ancient tradition of Western dominance.
Easterly advocates a more bottom-up approach to international aid. For the Western aid community, this means searching for and identifying what problems can be solved (or at least mitigated) by talking with actual people living in poverty—before assuming they know what really ails the global poor.
The key, Easterly writes, is not having a premade plan. Taking the bottom-up approach means figuring out new strategies through trial and error, identifying piecemeal solutions, and abandoning visionary, utopian plans.
This is crucial, because the most pressing problems facing the global poor are basic and need material solutions—lack of food, lack of clean drinking water, lack of good roads, lack of access to medicine. Aid agencies need to work with local partners to tackle these problems first.
The bottom-up model empowers local actors to devise solutions to problems in their communities; emphasizes partnerships with leaders on the ground; and takes resource limitations into account to focus more narrowly on immediate, tangible, and solvable problems. Because it is more restricted in scope, it is more likely than the top-down model to yield real, measurable results—which are crucial for holding aid programs accountable.
Perhaps most importantly, Easterly writes, the bottom-up model does not infantilize the global poor or treat them like children with their hands out in need of “saving” from the West. What the West has that poor countries don't is money—therefore, it would be far more effective for aid organizations to simply cut the checks and let local actors who know the community, history, culture, and resource limitations work out the specifics and design the programs.
Blending Top-Down and Bottom-Up
In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande likewise stresses the value of simple, measurable, and actionable solutions in a broad range of contexts and industries. He shares an anecdote of how a U.S. public health worker in Pakistan came up with a way to reduce deaths, infections, and diseases among children in poor areas of Pakistan—simply by providing people in select impoverished communities with free hand soap, as well as basic instructions on handwashing techniques. It was a purely bottom-up solution devised by a single person on the ground and was not overseen or directed by a central agency. Nevertheless, the soap proved to be a behavior-change vehicle. As people began using it, the incidence of diarrhea among children fell 52% while pneumonia and bacterial skin infections fell 48% and 35% respectively.
Other writers have championed the merits of a bottom-up approach and warned of the perils of top-down organization. In Getting Things Done, David Allen writes that a top-down approach often leads to three problems:
You can easily get too distracted by urgent demands to even stop and think about your big-picture goals.
You may be so overwhelmed by your day-to-day demands that the thought of incorporating big-picture goals is daunting and stressful.
Your big-picture goals and values are likely to raise more tasks and to-dos, which adds to your overloaded schedule instead of clarifying and culling it.
In Measure What Matters, John Doerr defines a top-down approach as one in which directives start with the CEO and cascade down through the ranks to the junior employees. In the bottom-up approach, by contrast, junior employees working on the front lines (the people who have the most access to customers) identify pressing needs and relay them up the chain of command to the leadership. Doerr argues that the most effective organizations blend both approaches, with half an employee’s objectives coming from the top and half set by the employee herself. He writes that employees should set most of their key results themselves, because people who choose their own goals take more responsibility for reaching them.
Easterly argues that entrepreneurship and free enterprise at the micro level are often the best pathways to bottom-up solutions. And he notes that there are success stories of bottom-up capitalism—small, locally based systems of voluntary exchange that emerge organically and are not imposed by some external force.
When given the opportunity, he writes, local entrepreneurs will find efficient, low-cost ways to manufacture and sell new goods to buyers in poor countries. It’s not centrally directed, and progress is often slow, but it is a sustainable model of economic growth.
Easterly writes that individuals everywhere are dynamic and entrepreneurial. Small, local successes can build and ultimately lead to a more sustainable market culture.
SGBs and the Value Chain
Although Easterly believes that local microenterprises and sole proprietors are the most important elements in sparking a capitalistic culture in developing countries, the World Bank makes a different argument. They write that the most impactful economic expansion comes from “small” and growing businesses (SGBs) that have up to 250 employees. They argue that enterprises of this size have much greater growth potential (and can therefore potentially employ many more people) than microenterprises, which generally have fewer than 10 employees.
According to the World Bank, SGBs in developing countries tend to be in the primary sector of the economy—that is, industries based upon the extraction and production of raw materials, such as logging, mining, farming, ranching, and fishing. SGBs play a special role because they forge economic links between different parts of the primary economy and create a value chain that connects farmers, traders, refiners, wholesalers, retailers, and customers—with the input from each link in the chain creating more value.
Easterly writes that free-market capitalism can be a powerful force that drives economic growth, stimulates the development of a robust civil society, and serves as a foundation for a democratic society. However, Easterly also argues that the broader social and cultural conditions that enable the development of a free-enterprise system must arise organically within a community—and that these conditions are all too often ignored by Western governments or Western-dominated NGOs when they attempt to impose free-market capitalism on emerging economies.
According to Easterly, nearly every attempt to impose free enterprise anywhere in the world has led to decidedly poor results, largely because the development community ignores or fails to understand precisely what makes capitalism viable.
Easterly notes that the freedom to produce, buy, and sell what we want gives people a strong incentive to develop specialized skills that they can exchange in the market for the things they can’t directly produce themselves.
Further, voluntary exchanges make everyone better off because they rationally allocate scarce resources and enable people to make their own choices about which goods and services they’d like to consume (and how much), without the heavy hand of central planners or bureaucrats—who are often corrupt or incompetent—making these decisions for them.
Easterly writes that capital markets—when they’re transparent and well-functioning—are highly efficient at directing investment toward its best, highest-return uses, while also providing credit to those looking to borrow and invest. In short, Easterly argues, markets are a highly effective bottom-up system for solving problems because they get resources to the people who need them.
Political and Economic Freedom
In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman argues that economic freedom is an essential component of total freedom—the ability of an individual to pursue her own happiness and fulfillment without any external impediments, provided that she does not infringe on the freedom of others. Friedman writes that a society cannot have political freedom without the ability of individual buyers and sellers in a marketplace to engage in voluntary transactions that satisfy their needs. In fact, according to Friedman, there has never been a successful example of a society that combined state control of the economy (in the form of socialism or communism) with political liberty.
Political power is dangerous, because it can be easily concentrated and centralized in the hands of the few. Economic power, however, works differently. In a well-functioning capitalist society, millions of individual buyers and sellers make decisions about which goods and services they require to satisfy their needs—with buyers free to choose their sellers, sellers to choose their buyers, and workers to choose their employers.
Thus, argues Friedman, a great deal of power over a crucial area of day-to-day life is taken away from the hands of the few, and placed into the hands of the many. Free markets are inherently decentralized in nature, thus maximizing individual freedom and choice. In a capitalist society, economic power acts as a check on the power of political authorities because it is not in the hands of the government.
However, writes Easterly, a free-market system cannot be imposed on a society that lacks the preconditions for it to function properly.
According to Easterly, markets don’t simply exist in a vacuum. Among other things, markets need a well-developed civil society, functional government, a legal system that respects private property rights and is based in the rule of law, and adequate regulation to ensure that goods are safe and reliable.
Perhaps most importantly, markets require a high degree of social trust among strangers in order to foster an economy based on voluntary transactions—trust is the only way customers know they won’t be ripped off, that what’s being sold is genuine, and that people will honor debts and pay for goods they’ve ordered. These values are deeply rooted in local culture and experience, and they can’t be imposed by an outside force.
It’s impossible to simply replicate a Western-style legal, judicial, and property ownership system in a country that is culturally unfamiliar with such institutions and expect them to work well.
Culture Change and Free-Market Reform
Cultures develop organically in communities of people—whether that community is an organization, a small town, or an entire nation—over long periods of time, without central planning or direction. When it’s entrenched, culture becomes something that most people don’t even consciously think about—rather, it is just the “natural” and “normal” way of doing things within that community.
As a result, it is difficult to transform a culture through some sort of top-down initiative, especially if that initiative is being led by someone from outside the community (as, Easterly points out, is nearly always the case when it comes to foreign aid). For example, in a culture based on collective subsistence farming or hunting, people will likely be highly skeptical and apprehensive about moving toward a free-enterprise system in which they individually produce goods or sell their labor in a market and then use the proceeds for their own personal consumption.
Some commentators argue that cultural change can only happen when small victories change an organization or society’s collective understanding of what’s possible. These incremental successes inspire confidence among people that they can do more. Thus, as we’ve seen Easterly argue, big, complex plans to “change the culture” are almost always doomed to failure. Instead, most experts write that culture change starts by addressing the most pressing challenges.
For instance, if the larger problem is a lack of free markets in a society, an incremental step might be giving entrepreneurs in select communities small grants to open up tiny independent businesses, or setting up local fairs or flea markets where people can begin to learn the basics of a free exchange system. Once these immediate challenges are successfully overcome, more ambitious goals can be attempted.
Easterly writes that since the 1980s, a lot of aid from developed countries has been conditioned on the imposition of free-market reforms upon recipient countries. However, this approach has done far more harm than good.
Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Western economists implemented what they called “shock treatment” programs in Russia and other former Soviet republics—the sudden removal of protectionist measures like price controls and state subsidies and the immediate privatization of state assets. The theory was that these reforms would unleash a new age of entrepreneurship that would help these Communist bloc countries transition from authoritarian, planned economies to liberal, free-market economies.
The results, according to Easterly, were a disaster. The sudden economic liberalization in Eastern Europe in the 1990s was swiftly followed by inflation, unemployment, poverty, economic stagnation, and the rise of a plutocratic class (often drawn from the ranks of former top Soviet officials) who used their connections to buy former state-run enterprises at bargain prices.
The Shock Doctrine, the Fall of Russia, and the Rise of Putin
In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explores economic shock therapy in greater detail. She describes shock therapy as a method of (supposedly) boosting a country’s economy through rapid deregulation, privatization, and severe cuts to government spending. In reality, however, Klein argues that the practice gave rise to what she calls the “disaster capitalism complex,” a privatized system of destruction and reconstruction of national economies that funnels billions of dollars into corporate pockets.
Klein notes that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a watershed historical moment that brought shock therapy to the fore—and had serious consequences for the people of Russia. Under Boris Yeltsin (the first leader of post-Soviet Russia), a team of Western-influenced Russian economists implemented an economic plan of deregulation, privatization, and reduction of government spending. Most significantly, they engineered the selloff of major national industries to wealthy buyers—oligarchs who plotted with politicians to purchase public assets at a steep discount. Most disturbingly of all, these wealthy oligarchs paid for the assets out of bank accounts created by government officials and funded by public money.
In his bestselling memoir, A Promised Land, former President Barack Obama makes a connection between the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin (Yeltsin’s successor) and these failed attempts at economic and political liberalization. Obama describes Putin as an authoritarian figure who rode the popular backlash against the country’s decline in the 1990s from a world power to an impoverished, indebted, and dysfunctional state following its collapse and the sudden imposition of market reforms. By the time Obama came to office in 2009, Russia under Putin had reversed many of the limited, Western-backed steps toward democracy—in many ways, slipping back into authoritarianism.
The Putin regime has been known to jail political opponents on trumped-up charges, while much of the nation’s economic power continues to rest in the hands of Putin-connected crony capitalists. Obama writes that Putin’s political style was to position himself as a ruthless strongman, committed to restoring Russia to its former glory—with over-the-top masculine displays, blatant homophobia, and chauvinistic gestures toward Russia’s ethnic and religious minorities all forming central elements of his political pageantry.
Indeed, commentators have argued that Putin’s primary ideology is to “make Russia great again,” a theme that Putin-controlled state propaganda has aggressively reinforced by presenting Putin himself as a unique historical figure who can restore the nation to its former glory.
Similarly, Easterly writes that the IMF and the World Bank have imposed a variation of shock therapy under the softer name of “structural adjustment loans”—economic reforms that recipient countries must implement in order to secure the loan. These reforms usually involve some combination of a reduction in public spending, privatization, deregulation, and a removal of trade barriers, with the ostensible purpose of galvanizing the transition to a free-market economy and improving the population’s standard of living.
However, according to Easterly, the track record of structural adjustment loans has likewise been a dismal failure. Countries often end up on multiple rounds of loans, with new loans used to cover the old ones. This only increases these countries’ overall debt load, requiring more good money to be thrown after bad, in a never-ending, vicious cycle. These governments are seldom held accountable for their corruption and fiscal irresponsibility—and, as a result, have little incentive to reform, since they know they can usually count on another round of loans.
As a result, the foreign aid ends up propping up and rewarding bad governments, while saddling their economies with massive debt loads that make them undesirable destinations for international business investment—all to the detriment of the people. The aid seldom reaches the poor people who need it, instead getting siphoned off to dictators, war criminals, local mafia-like organizations, or corrupt politicians.
The Problem of Moral Hazard
Of course, if an irresponsible government knows that it is going to continually be bailed out by the World Bank or IMF, they have little incentive to reform or crack down on corruption. In The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford describes this dynamic as a moral hazard. Moral hazard results when the existence of some kind of insurance against liability inadvertently removes the incentive for responsible behavior. For example, if your car is insured against theft, you’ll be more likely to park it on the street (where theft is more likely to occur); whereas if it isn’t insured, you might be willing to pay for a car lot (which would make theft less likely).
Harford argues that moral hazards are inherent in public unemployment insurance systems as well, because they partially demotivate people to find a new job. But as a society, we don’t want people to become destitute when they suffer job loss, so the creation of some moral hazard is necessary in a benevolent society. Similarly, the IMF and World Bank have made the tradeoff that the moral hazard of bailing out known bad actors is better than the alternative of default.
Easterly writes that what’s true for capitalism is also true for democracy. They are both good systems that, in the long run, lead to superior outcomes over their alternatives. But in poorly run countries, they cannot be imposed in the top-down manner favored by Western aid organizations. To put it another way, foreign aid is not going to change bad governance, nor will it be effective if given to bad governments to distribute.
Easterly argues that corrupt and authoritarian governments play a big role in causing and sustaining poverty, because their pattern of extortion, incompetence, graft, and selective enforcement of the law makes their countries politically risky places in which to invest or form businesses. In contrast, stronger democracy and political freedoms are positively correlated with significantly greater growth than found in authoritarian regimes.
Easterly argues that democracy actually works in a bottom-up rather than top-down fashion, because it favors local responsiveness to local demands. It creates a system of accountability for government officials: Good politicians who deliver for the public get rewarded through reelection, while bad ones who are unresponsive to the public get voted out.
Moreover, a liberal political system allows for a free press that can expose government wrongdoing while providing civil protections for dissidents and minorities.
The Case Against Democracy
Not all commentators agree that democracy is a good system of government, worthy of emulation. In Against Democracy, libertarian author Jason Brennan argues that democracy is an inherently flawed system that consistently leads to poor outcomes.
The crux of Brennan’s argument is that the overwhelming majority of voters are too ignorant, self-interested, biased, and apathetic to make informed decisions. As a result, they tend to elect politicians who are reflections of themselves—ill-informed, narrow-minded, incompetent, and simply unintelligent. Brennan’s solution to this problem is to establish a system in which only the best-educated, rational, and most scientific-minded members of the population would have the right to vote. Specifically, he recommends selecting and screening potential voters the same way that members of trial juries are screened and weeded out for potential biases.
Despite its virtues, however, Easterly asserts that democracy is not a perfect system. Indeed, democracies can be fractured by ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic divisions, all of which can be exploited by politicians who pander to different groups’ resentments toward one another—and in the process, undermine the social fabric that is the cornerstone of a well-functioning system of self-government.
Easterly writes that democracies are quite fragile, vulnerable to sabotage and even destruction by unscrupulous actors within the political system. And because they’re inherently fragile, Easterly argues that it’s impossible to design a perfect democracy. Like a free-market system, a successful democracy depends on underlying social conditions and experiences. Those elements are deeply rooted in a country’s history and culture, which can’t be changed by even the most well-intentioned external democracy-promotion plans. Easterly explains that certain socioeconomic conditions tend to make poor soil for democracies to take root and grow—including wide income inequality, a traditional and patriarchal social structure, an entrenched landed elite, a history of sectarian conflicts, and rigid racial caste systems.
Outside agents, whether they’re the IMF, World Bank, or United Nations, cannot simply override these deep anti-democratic structural forces to impose a democracy.
Norms and Democratic Survival
As Easterly writes, it’s difficult to arbitrarily impose democracy in places where the social and cultural conditions are inhospitable to a free political system. But even in societies where there is a long history of democratic government and mass political participation, democracies can be vulnerable to sabotage and self-destruction.
In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that political norms—the unwritten rules that govern political conduct—provide the best protection for democracy. In a well-functioning democracy, political actors adhere to shared norms governing what is and is not acceptable behavior, regardless of what might be technically permitted by the written rules. They write that democracies become fragile and vulnerable to collapse when political actors begin using their power to undermine or violate these norms.
The two main democratic norms Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight are mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. The authors define mutual toleration as accepting the legitimacy of one’s political opponents and acknowledging their right to govern, as long as they win in free and fair elections—regardless of ideological differences.
The second norm Levitsky and Ziblatt identify is institutional forbearance. This is the unwritten rule by which political actors agree not to weaponize their control of institutions to marginalize their opponents. For example, the majority party in the legislature might technically have the legal authority to uniformly and unequivocally block the judicial nominations of a president of the opposite party. But doing so would not only hamper the functioning of the judiciary, but be a violation of the norm of institutional forbearance. This could lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation—resulting in the ultimate destruction of democracy.
Easterly extends his critique of the prevailing foreign development aid model to the structure of the aid organizations themselves. He writes that the major aid organizations are saddled by inefficient bureaucracies that lack accountability, overlap or compete with one another, and don’t have clearly defined goals.
Easterly contrasts the behavior and incentives of the aid bureaucracies with those of the private sector. Private-sector bureaucrats (like managers, customer service agents, and salespeople) are responsive because of market incentives: Customers will take their business elsewhere if they don’t feel they're being treated well.
But international aid workers lack this accountability mechanism, largely because they tend to be based in the rich countries themselves—far away from the places they’re meant to be helping. This means that they are responsive to politicians, voters, and donors in the rich countries—not to the impoverished people they ostensibly serve.
The Aid Community and the Principal-Agent Problem
The competing incentives of the aid community—the need to please the rich donors in their home countries while simultaneously working on behalf of the poor people they’re meant to serve—is similar to what’s known in economics and in managerial studies as the principal-agent problem. This arises when a party engaged to carry out a task (the agent) has poorly designed incentives that lead them to engage in behavior that works against the interests of the party they work for (the principal).
In this case, it’s best to think of the people in developing countries as the principals and the aid organizations as the agents. Although the aid organizations are meant to be working on behalf of their principals, in reality, they have a strong incentive to do things that will result in getting more money from the rich countries (to pay their own salaries and expand their staff), as well as favorable press coverage (to make themselves look good). As a result, these agencies tend to focus on the kind of high-profile, flashy, attention-grabbing initiatives that generate lots of donations and clicks—but do little to help people in the developing world, and in fact, draw vital resources and attention away from their most pressing needs.
Easterly writes that the aid community is also plagued by a lack of coordination among agencies. There are too many aid agencies, and many of them have overlapping or conflicting portfolios and missions.
This makes it difficult to figure out which agency is responsible for solving which problem, and it creates wasteful and time-consuming red tape that prevents people on the ground from getting the help they need. The lack of coordination also creates a problem for donors. Because of the multitude of agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it’s difficult for donors to figure out where to contribute their money. This means they end up spending resources inefficiently, because there’s no central agency to direct donors to the best and most effective use of their money.
The Benefits of Collaboration Among Aid Organizations
Nonprofit experts write that the coordination problems that Easterly describes can be avoided or overcome through more effective collaboration between nonprofit organizations. Partnerships or collaborations can help mission-oriented organizations pool administrative resources like accounting, purchasing, office supplies, and transportation—lowering overhead and freeing up resources to allocate to direct programming. By joining forces, nonprofits or aid organizations can also expand the range of services they offer by tapping each other's experience and talent—especially if they have related, but different, missions.
For example, an aid organization focused on improving irrigation systems in developing countries can partner with an aid organization that works to teach farmers more sustainable agriculture practices to offer a more comprehensive set of services to agricultural workers.
Easterly writes that all bureaucracies need clear, defined goals. This enables others to hold these organizations accountable, because they can evaluate how they performed relative to the benchmarks they set.
To move toward accountability, Easterly recommends that aid bureaucracies develop clear portfolios and stake out specific areas of expertise by clearly defining which problems they are working to solve and creating specific metrics to gauge performance.
In general, Easterly writes that this means having fewer objectives and scrapping the grandiose, top-down plans in favor of more realistic, tangible, measurable goals. Narrowing their focus will enable these organizations to develop subject-matter expertise and cultivate useful knowledge.
Crucially, Easterly writes that the aid community needs independent evaluations of its work and progress. He argues that these independent evaluators could be drawn from the ranks of business and academia.
Tracking Progress
In Measure What Matters, John Doerr argues that the best way to track progress toward goals and develop useful metrics is to identify your company’s objectives and key results (OKRs).
Your objective is your ultimate goal, what you and your team exist to achieve. All objectives must be measurable, concrete, and action-oriented. Your key results are the rungs on the ladder leading to your objective. These are the sub-goals that facilitate the achievement of your ultimate objective.
To implement the OKR system, Doerr advises that you need to start by identifying the most important tasks your organization needs to accomplish within a set timeframe. Once you’ve identified your company’s objectives, you then direct departments, teams, and individuals to identify their own objectives. Every objective, regardless of whether it’s an individual or department objective, should align with the company’s top objectives.
Easterly writes that public health is one area where international aid actually has achieved real, measurable success, possibly because it is a subject that lends itself well to defining clear goals and measuring direct impact—in terms of vaccines administered, patients treated, new hospitals built, and other metrics. However, he adds that public health is where the international aid community has also suffered some of its greatest public failures.
Easterly writes that the AIDS crisis in Africa has been one of the world’s greatest humanitarian disasters since the 1980s. He argues that the aid community’s response to the AIDS pandemic has been marred by the same utopian, top-down, impractical thinking that has compromised its efforts elsewhere.
Explaining the Higher Rate of HIV/AIDS Infection in Africa
The numbers show the true scale of the AIDS catastrophe in Africa—and the devastating price humanity has paid for the world’s failure to properly address it. In the small African nation of Botswana, a full 40% of sexually active adults are HIV-positive, with similar figures in other sub-Saharan countries. By contrast, the rate of infection among sexually active adults in the US is around 1%, with similarly low rates in countries from Russia to India to Thailand. Experts continue to be perplexed by the extraordinarily high infection rates in Africa, given that Africans do not appear to use intravenous drugs, participate in promiscuous sex, or engage in prostitution—all well-documented risk factors for HIV/AIDS—at higher levels than people in other parts of the world.
Some researchers suggest that the greater social tolerance for men in African nations from South Africa to Uganda to Botswana to engage in multiple, simultaneous, long-term sexual relationships could be the explanation. This is because a single act of intercourse with an HIV-positive individual is relatively unlikely to spread the virus—between 0.1% and 1%. But in a long-term sexual relationship with repeated sexual encounters (and thus, exposure to the virus), the likelihood of infection will be far greater.
Much of the response to AIDS in Africa today is focused on helping HIV-positive people access antiretroviral drugs that are used to treat the symptoms of the virus. However, Easterly argues, these HIV/AIDS treatments are simply not cost-effective in Africa—and the disproportionate emphasis placed on them reflects misguided utopian thinking on the part of the aid community.
The drugs are too expensive to be able to distribute in impoverished African countries on a wide enough scale. Moreover, an effective treatment regimen entails not just the drugs, but also a comprehensive set of services that, once again, is beyond the capabilities of the aid agencies to build from scratch in countries often lacking the most basic public health infrastructure.
Finally, Easterly argues, the drugs won’t prevent most AIDS deaths anyway—at best, they might prolong a patient’s life by a few years.
Easterly attributes the inefficient focus on treatment drugs to grandiose, heroic, and glamorous ideas about “solving” or “curing” the AIDS crisis in Africa. In fact, prevention would be far more cost-effective.
Even today, he writes, the foreign aid community is inordinately focused on treatment. Much of this is purely political—highly effective (and cost-effective) prevention measures like sex education and condom distribution are politically controversial (and less impressive), while distributing medication is relatively uncontroversial (and generates glowing publicity and accolades)
Harm Mitigation and Needle Exchange Programs
Sex education and condom distribution to combat the spread of HIV are not the only effective and practical harm-mitigation measures to suffer from a misplaced emphasis on “perfect” solutions. Like those measures, needle exchange programs—in which intravenous drug users can obtain free and safe needles and syringes and discard used needles and other paraphernalia without fear of arrest or harassment—have proven to be highly effective at reducing the spread of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis C and HIV, and they help connect addicts with treatment programs. Cities in states from Vermont to California have implemented such programs, with notable success: CDC data shows that users of needle exchange programs and safe injection sites are five times more likely to enter drug treatment and about three times more likely to ultimately stop using drugs than those who never use such programs.
However, the stigma and backlash that such programs generate—usually borne of misguided fears that they encourage or legitimize drug use—has created political pressure to shut these facilities down in states from West Virginia to Indiana and shift toward more “zero tolerance” policies, even as the opioid epidemic rages out of control.
Besides being ineffective, Easterly argues that big, publicity-grabbing health crises like AIDS divert much-needed resources and attention away from other sources of death and misery on the African continent that could often be treated more effectively and cheaply.
He argues that there is no legitimate moral case to be made for prioritizing the suffering of AIDS patients (nearly all of whom, unfortunately, will soon die of the disease with or without treatment) over that of people suffering from maladies like diarrhea, malaria, and intestinal worms. While these latter diseases do not command the attention of the global public and media the way AIDS does, they do kill millions of people each year. However, unlike AIDS, they are all highly treatable with inexpensive medicines.
Easterly argues that the disproportionate use of resources and attention focused on AIDS is both inefficient and inhumane, because it diverts money from an area where it would make a meaningful difference (treating diseases like malaria and diarrhea) to one where it almost certainly won’t (treating AIDS patients). Refocusing resources on these sources of suffering would both give the aid community a far greater return on its investment and result in millions of lives saved.
The international aid community has to do a better job of making difficult choices about how best to prioritize and allocate scarce resources.
The moral argument that Easterly is making when he advocates prioritizing the treatment of malaria and diarrhea over HIV/AIDS is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a moral school of thought, founded by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) that is concerned primarily with final outcomes. Utilitarian thought teaches that any action that maximizes human happiness is the morally correct one.
Thus, it would be morally correct to let one person die in order to save the lives of 10 others. If we apply utilitarianism to the arguments that Easterly is making, it would be morally indefensible to use medical resources to prolong the life of one AIDS patient—or even, hypothetically, to save that one patient—if it came at the cost of letting 10 malaria patients die who would otherwise live.
Explore how and why international aid should be distributed.
What do you see as the appropriate rationale for providing international aid? Should the reasons be moral, pragmatic, or strategic?
How would you prioritize providing aid (what criteria would you use)? What, if anything, would you want to see in return?
Do you think governments should refuse disaster or humanitarian aid to other governments deemed to be authoritarian or corrupt? Explain why or why not.
Explore how free markets come into play in global development.
Do you think free markets are a force for good that enhances personal and economic freedom, or do you think they exploit society’s most disadvantaged people? Why?
Do you think entrepreneurship generally helps or hurts people in developing countries? Why or why not?
What baseline conditions do you think a society needs to meet in order to have a functioning free-market economy? Do you think these conditions can be created from the outside or do they need to arise organically within a society?