William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 448 pp., $27.95.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY Sachs, author of The End of Poverty (2005), advisor to Kofi Annan on the UN Millennium Development Goals, and advocate for immediate multibillion-dollar initiatives to boost foreign aid spending, was in a testy mood recently when a reporter for a Toronto newspaper visited one of his development projects in Kenya. A question about corruption prompted a harsh reaction from the professor from Columbia University--as if simply posing the question suggested that Africans couldn't take care of themselves or their money.

"The whole development discussion has become unhinged from ground realities", Sachs told the Globe and Mail. "There is endless discussion about process and corruption and governance, as if these are realities of life in Africa--and it's all deflected attention away from things like growing food and drinking water."

As he spoke, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), citing Kenya President Mwai Kibaki's failure to act against graft and official corruption, were placing holds on some $900 million in aid to his country. Kenyan investigators recently turned up separate schemes designed to loot the nation's treasury in sums of $600 million, $100 million and $700 million. In response to the government's plans to offer amnesty to corrupt officials or persuade bandits in high places to voluntarily surrender ill-gotten gains, Kenyan property lawyer Isaac Ngaruthi offered this assessment: "It's naive to expect these people, who clearly have the law behind them, to give up their wealth and in so doing admit to the world, 'Yes, we are stinking corrupt', and willingly hang themselves on a cross for public crucifixion and ridicule."

Into this weird world where Western idealism meets African reality, comes William Easterly's The White Man's Burden, a convincing indictment of a foreign aid industry that has funneled, during the course of the last five decades, some $2.3 trillion in aid from rich countries into places like Kenya. And still, Easterly says, all that Western aid "had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths."

Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, has written an insider's account. He spent 16 years as a World Bank economist and his experience in the field shows in the short anecdotal "snapshots" included as endnotes. These anecdotes, much more than the fever charts and tables of economic data that fill the book, bring home Easterly's "small is better" approach to foreign aid. What the foreign aid establishment lacks, he says, is precisely the ability to understand how programs work at ground level. Foreign aid organizations, highly developed bureaucracies that churn out massive reports and inspiring mission statements, lack accountability, incentives for superior performance and mechanisms for feedback from the very people they claim to help.

From Easterly's point of view, there are two types of aid workers: Planners and Searchers. You can guess where the problem lies.

"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."

As a self-described "noninterventionist", Easterly prefers the bottom-up approach that puts the Searchers (some of whom may work for large aid organizations) looking for creative solutions to problems, in concert with the people who need that help. "All the hoopla about having the right plan is itself a symptom of the misdirected approach to foreign aid taken by so many in the past and so many still today", Easterly writes. "The right plan is to have no plan."

Drawing on the thinking of Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, Easterly puts himself on the side of piecemeal, fix-it-as-you-go political and economic reform, in opposition to what Popper described as "utopian social engineering." Easterly's preference for the Searcher as social entrepreneur is also consonant with the "spontaneous order" theory of social scientist Michael Polanyi, whereby productive social networks and relationships arise spontaneously through the myriad interactions and exchanges of individuals mutually adjusting to a changing environment. Polanyi applied this theory to explain not just the market, but other fields as well, such as scientific research.

Yet the Planners, Easterly complains, "keep pouring resources into a fixed objective, despite many previous failures at reaching that objective, despite a track record that suggests the objective is infeasible or the plan unworkable." He's highly skeptical of hubristic attempts by organizations such as the World Bank and IMF to reform bad governments and bottomed-out economies with carrot-and-stick policies such as "structural adjustment." But as Easterly points out, the Planners have the rhetorical high ground: programs that promise to "end world poverty" grab headlines, mollify donor governments and provide rich photo opportunities with the likes of Bono and Angelina Jolie.

For the Searchers, Easterly prescribes a market-based model. The market, he maintains, is not only "hard-wired into human nature." Its "positive feedback loop to searching for solutions to customers' problems has made the market the greatest bottom-up system in history for meeting people's needs. (If only foreign aid could work like that.)"

But to work efficiently, the market needs a broad array of norms and social institutions to keep it well-oiled. Those institutions limit other tendencies that are hard-wired into human nature, such as cheating and stealing. Having rejected utopian fixes from policymakers in New York and London and Geneva, Easterly is careful not to advocate an alternative utopia: free markets for the desperately poor. Witness the disastrous consequences of the free market "shock therapy" prescribed for Russia following its emergence from seventy years of Soviet collectivism and command-and-control planning. Easterly writes:

"Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change."

In other places of the world, he points out, Planners with hopes of shocking cultures into market economics and the rule of law will fail miserably if they do not understand how business may be intertwined with ethnic, tribal or clan loyalties. These loyalties, Easterly holds, are also at the root of Western market economies. "The Western world evolved gradually through such bottom-up mechanisms, some combination of benevolent social norms, self-protection societies and local strong men", he says.

Easterly offers ample illustrations of how the Searchers have succeeded here and there, in spite of the Planner's utopian tendencies. The examples cited in his book, he says, have been subject to rigorous evaluation--something the foreign aid establishment could use more of. One example Easterly points to is Mexico's PROGRESA program, which provides cash grants to mothers who keep their children in school, participate in health-education programs, and bring their kids to clinics for checkups and health supplements. Evaluations of PROGRESA, set against a control sample that was not participating in the program, showed clear benefits. The lesson here, Easterly says, is that "a combination of free choice and scientific evaluation can build support for an aid program where things that work can be expanded rapidly."

Of course, many things won't work, which is the nature of experimentation in aid policy, just as it is in scientific research or commercial entrepreneurship. If Easterly is right about the need to move foreign aid in the direction of small, piecemeal solutions organized intensively at the grass roots level, then those who fund these projects will have to learn to tolerate a fair degree of failure. Donor countries, aid organizations and even wealthy individuals who bankroll these projects will have to view their participation as experimental as well. In fact, a smart social entrepreneur might even find a way to organize a type of portfolio or mutual fund of social investments, some yielding workable solutions and others not. For donors, the bet would be that their social investments would yield over time a small number of hugely successful programs that could be repeated elsewhere.

EASTERLY EXTENDS his Planners and Searchers paradigm to military action, where again he is showing his noninterventionist colors. He writes: "Military intervention and occupation show a classic Planner's mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in the Rest." A major section of The White Man's Burden is devoted to a broad-brush history of colonization, decolonization and what he views as resurgent American imperialism. This is less of a revelation, as when he attempts to trace the history of colonial involvement in the Middle East and concludes that "the British and the French cared only for their colonial interests" and "British duplicity about Palestine and Arab independence did not help set the region on a path toward peaceful development." But the Arabs haven't been a lot of help in that department, either.

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