The Burden of Planning
Easterly claims that his interest in military intervention is based on the outcomes for the poor counties involved, not whether these adventures were necessary for American national security. But he is not persuasive here. In a long table titled "Some Cold War Interventions" he is uniformly dismissive of any outcome other than death, destruction, genocide and destabilization. Easterly's mordant "silver lining" for the Vietnam War: an "explosion of Vietnamese restaurants in the United States." What he can't tell us--and no one can--is what places like Malaysia and Thailand and Singapore would look like today if communism had been allowed a free pass to execute the dreams of its own Planners in Hanoi, Havana, Beijing and Moscow.
For a book that takes Kipling's poem on the moral requirements of imperialism as its title and inspiration, Easterly's book pays surprisingly little attention to the religious activism that has agitated for more foreign aid for better than fifty years. After all, we are talking about guilt here, are we not? In 1959, George Kennan affirmed that Christian meaning could be found, if not in the unpredictable results of policy, at least in the way the government conducts itself. "We can look for it, first of all, in the methods of our diplomacy, where decency and humanity of spirit can never fail to serve the Christian cause."
Easterly takes potshots at the religious Right and its growing interest in international relations. But to the extent that conservative Christian groups are raising awareness about issues such as Darfur, sex trafficking and the HIV/AIDS crisis, this is incontestably a good thing. Easterly, however, should have balanced his sniping with a look at the how well-meaning people of faith in western Europe and the United States are fevered by the endless stumping of the religious Left (and its institutional voices at the World Council of Churches and National Council of Churches) for debt forgiveness, increased foreign aid spending and peacekeeping missions to various hotspots. Almost none of this activism by the liberal churches, by the way, comes with even a boilerplate mention of the need for accountability or measurable results.
Easterly has written a very useful book that will help balance the emotionally overwrought tenor of foreign aid advocacy today. Anyone who reads this book--with the possible exception of Jeffrey Sachs--could reasonably conclude that if the foreign aid establishment continues to manage its business as it has for the last fifty years, we will continue to get the same depressing results. And because of this mismanagement, waste and corruption, millions of innocent people are dying for the lack of twelve-cent medicines.
Let's not, however, underestimate the ability of the foreign aid bureaucracy to maintain the status quo, even as it publicly acknowledges the necessity of "reform" and "accountability." And, given the history, who could trust this establishment to figure out a better way?
As James Q. Wilson warned in his 1989 study Bureaucracy:
"Innovation is not inevitably good; there are at least as many bad changes as good. And government agencies are especially vulnerable to bad changes because, absent a market that would impose a fitness test on any organizational change, a changed public bureaucracy can persist in doing the wrong thing for years. The Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels."
Unfortunately, the foreign aid industry is still in the business of building Edsels. It's time for a new and improved model.
John Couretas is director of communications for the Acton institute.