Virginia Postrel reviews The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly:
There are two tragedies of the world’s poor. The first is the one we hear about: that so many people suffer so much for lack of inexpensive remedies.The second, he says, ‘is the tragedy in which the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.’ The West is not stingy. It is ineffective.
An example of how incentives matter:
When aid agencies hand [insecticide-treated mosquito nets] out in poor countries, he writes, “nets are often diverted to the black market . . . or wind up being used as fishing nets or wedding veils.” Free nets don’t get to the people who need them.But in rural Malawi, clinics serving new mothers sell insecticide-treated bed nets for 50 cents each. The nets come from a program developed by local Malawians working for Population Services International, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. In Malawi’s cities, the group sells nets for $5 each, using the profits to subsidize sales in the countryside.
The program, Easterly reports, has “increased the nationwide average of children under 5 sleeping under nets from 8 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2004. . . . A follow-up survey found nearly universal use of the nets by those who paid for them.” By contrast, when a Zambian program handed out free nets, “70 percent of the recipients didn’t use” them. Charging for nets may sound hardhearted, but prices provide vital information about commitment.
Instead of getting objective feedback and judging their success based on that, Easterly notes, “advocates measure success by how much money rich countries spend”:
Praising the G-8 industrialized nations for doubling aid to Africa, he says, is like reviewing Hollywood films based on their budgets.
Daniel Drezner also reviews Eaterly’s The White Man’s Burden:
Déjà vu begins to set in after seeing Mr. Easterly quote from the failed projects of decades ago — the problems and “solutions” repeat themselves miserably. He has great fun, too, interpreting this turgid prose for the layman. A war is relabeled as a “conflict-related reallocation of resources”; corrupt leaders who raid public coffers create “governance issues.”