The White Man's Burden

http://download.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/0140-6736/PIIS0140673606685619.pdf
The White Man’s Burden has one basic motif: that large-scale plans to help the poor through increased foreign aid are bound to go awry.
According to William Easterly, there is too much corruption in recipient countries, unaccountability in delivery mechanisms, and sheer uncertainty about what to do. Rather than aiming big, with comprehensive and well funded strategies, Easterly thinks it is better to aim small and piecemeal, making progress one gradual step at a time—“the right plan is to have no plan”, he asserts. Aid should be as he imagines markets to be: without plans but fi lled with “searchers” looking for piecemeal progress.
Searching is, of course, needed to identify best practices for foreign aid. But so too are plans, at local, national, and international levels, to take those best practices to scale.
Easterly seems to misunderstand the historical record on aid, and, far more unfortunately, to misjudge what’s possible in the future. His main methodological error is a failure to make careful distinctions across countries and types of aid programme.
By neglecting to hone in on what has worked and failed in the past, Easterly conveys a misplaced sense of helplessness in the face of massive but solvable problems.
The critical fact is that much is known about how to help the poor. As The Lancet helped to show in its 2003 series on child mortality, the know-how and technologies exist to save lives each year by the millions, and to improve livelihoods by the tens or hundreds of millions, but only by expanding beyond piecemeal approaches and applying knowledge at scale. The same conclusions were reached in two reports that I helped to direct for WHO and the United Nations in
2001 and 2005, respectively, both of which are roundly criticised by Easterly.