The
White Man’s Burden
By Jim Miles
20 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Book Rview: The White
Man’s Burden: Why The West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have
Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. William Easterly. Penguin
Books, New York, 2006.
This
is one of those books that comes so close to getting it right all the
way along, and in truth actually does get it right, but not always for
the expressed reasons. The reader has to consider the author and the
probable intended audience. The author, William Easterly, is a former
World Bank research economist; his target should be people similar to
himself and those currently in academia. Why else write a book criticizing
the global top-down foreign aid/anti-poverty groups (governmental, corporate,
or otherwise) if not to target that audience?
Two author comparisons come
to mind: Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Friedman.
Stiglitz is also an ex-World
Bank functionary, in a higher position but not there for the same duration.
His writing Globalization and its Discontents (W.W. Norton, 2003) is
a much more aggressive and hard –hitting work calling for a full
reform of the World Bank and the IMF as they are root causes of many
of the world’s economic, social, and political problem (they are
obviously all inter-related). He arrives at the same conclusion as Easterly,
saying “The result [of globalization of the Washington Consensus]
for many people has been poverty and for many countries social and political
chaos. The IMF has made mistakes in all the areas it has been involved
in.”
The comparison to Friedman
is more stylistic. Easterly uses personal anecdotes from his many travels
around the world and uses analogies to emphasize certain points, but
the analogies tend to be “too cute” and are readily overcome
with faults if the reader tries to extend them much further than the
initial application. Fortunately for Easterly, he does not fit into
Friedman’s grand rhetoric of exceptionalism that supports the
American empire in all its endeavours. However, there is a continual
battle within Easterly himself of not quite wanting to give up on his
long years as an avowed “democrat” and “free marketeer”.
The last two points, free
markets and democracy are not something I am against - democracy is
great, fair markets are, well more fair - but Easterly does not quite
get around to defining them directly, but only indirectly through his
examples, and his examples do not always fit into the World Bank apron
strings that he cannot quite relinquish. The text assumes the reader
knows what democracy is. The text also assumes the reader understands
free markets and its global complexities in comparison to local free
markets. That of course might be appropriate for his audience, but also
might presume more awareness than actually exists. Throughout, there
is an implicit understanding that democracy equals free markets equals
capitalism.
Interestingly enough when
discussing “democracy” he consistently says that aid organizations
should “ask the people”, respond to what the local people
in local situations are interested in, and be accountable to the local
people where the aid is targeted. That is truly democracy, and he seldom
mentions voting, and he never describes government level political structures,
but always, and thankfully, unerringly, returns to the “people”
- for such is democracy – people power. All his concerns about
democracy relate back to the “free market”, but again his
examples give an implicit definition that “free markets”
are not all that free, and all the examples again come from localized
situations. He briefly, from time to time, touches also on consumer
needs, never really looking at what a consumer needs (food, water, shelter,
clothing, health) and what his created wants are through advertising
propaganda. There is no mention of the burdens that an overly consumptive
society, demanding wealth in the form of goods, services, and financing
from across the globe, might have on other less powerful, less developed
countries
But the local markets are
not free as he indicates, with clan, business, family, and resource
affiliations among others that provide restraints on the freedom of
trade. The ultimate irony of his writing is his argument that free markets
cannot just exist willy-nilly but need to have rules for their proper
operation, ultimately then denying them the adjective “free”.
There are few arguments on the international scale that are used to
support free market arguments – perhaps because there are no truly
free markets, but a huge set of rules based on the economic good of
the corporations and wealthy elite who ultimately control the government
beyond the power of the voter. Of those examples that are used, many
had large government interventions to protect their own developing industries
(South Korea, Japan), several of them are not democracies (Singapore
has made it into the “developed world”), and most have had
histories of outside intervention that limited their democracy and freedom
of marketing (Japan’s Diet and the influence of the samurai business
class in the keiretsu precludes free markets and democracy in Japan,
supported with several dozen American military bases).
Returning to the idea of
“asking the people” is where Easterly cannot quite let go
of his World Bank apron strings. Never is the word “socialism”
even mentioned in the book, although the vast majority of his examples
of how to have a successful aid program return to the people and their
needs. That part is democracy, and a social democracy, not a capitalist
one (an oxymoron anyway, as capitalism breeds the poverty it needs to
create the cheap labour and cheap resources for the wealth of the power
elites).
His solutions include education,
more education, and then some more. Certainly he argues other points,
and mostly other points, as to how to reach the masses of poor, but
social services money spent in some way to support education (aid to
mothers to help keep their kids in school as tried successfully in Mexico)
always seems to be at the base of the success. That includes the success
stories of former poverty stricken people heading abroad to receive
higher degrees in education (most anecdotal examples relating to the
U.S.) then returning to their native countries to establish a learning
centre or a business. But even business when it is the emphasis of the
anecdote invariably includes the establishment of some form of schooling
to help improve the local conditions.
Yes, that is my bias and
also my interpretation, but I think it would be difficult for Easterly
to dispute it. Education (especially for women) has a strong co-relation
with all other factors that determine a healthy society, such as infant
mortality, life expectancy, income gaps, disease rates, and birth rates.
Easterly’s main method of evaluating success always returns to
the GDP per capita, yet that statistic can be hugely misleading. Sure,
there are many more billionaires and millionaires around the world,
but the numbers still living in poverty are huge, and by some sources
have increased under World Bank/IMF ministrations (in particular see,
Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, Henry Holt & Company, 2006; also
see Stiglitz, Chomsky, Amy Chua, and Walden Bello)). For every billionaire
there are hundreds of thousands that can live in poverty, yet the GDP
per capita can still look quite comfortable in terms of poverty definitions.
Easterly uses statistics
quite significantly in arguing his point, and that – apart from
the GDP mis-direction – is his strongest supporting suit. All
the statistics he looks at for the aid agencies indicate that, whatever
his rhetorical arguments, the IMF and World bank and other aid agencies,
whether government sponsored or independents, have failed across the
board with their attempts at assistance.
For all his arguments, and
all his statistics, Easterly does finally arrive at a conclusion that
many around the globe have known for a while: intervention does not
work, either economically or militarily. We need to ask the people themselves
what would help them the most and deliver on those requests. Beyond
what Easterly proposes as suggestions to improve aid (a touch of top
down bureaucratese sneaking back into his arguments) I think we could
expect an answer that the IMF and World Bank as currently constituted
could not provide. What those answers are I have no true idea (my educational
statistic most likely would not appear before food and shelter), only
guesses. Let’s ask the people.
Jim Miles is a Canadian educator
and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews
to Palestine Chronicles. His interest in this topic stems originally
from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization
and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification
by corporate governance and by the American government.
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