A Fool's Burden vs. White Man's Burden and the Tyranny of Experts

I would like to have called this post "A dummy's burden" or better still "A fool's burden". Let me note that being a fool is not a bad idea at all. I had seen one of my chiefs playing the fool when someone from a mission asked him an awkward question and so escaped unscathed.

But then I recalled reading about some book reviews on Easterley's White Man's Burden and it became the post's title as it is. With that, what I thought I'm trying to do, for not only this post but also for the whole of Bayanathi Technology blog, is to share some of my hoarded goodies (mostly outdated) or some of those things that fly past me so fast that I couldn't grasp any of them and yet I felt they must be good.

The academics and (relatively) young gurus (henceforth saya-lays) some of who went out on foot but dropped back in from Airbuses or Boeings would certainly have missions driven by Saya-lays' Burden for Myanmars in contrast to White-man's Burden, Yellow-man's Burden, Holy-man's Burden, Brown-man's Burden or whatever. We hope that Saya-lays and their handiworks are politically, developmentally, culturally, environmentally, and socially correct.

For the uninitiated (I am really thinking about my fellow ordinary folks here) "White man's burden" the poem has seven stanzas and begins with:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden, 1899. "This famous poem, written by Britain's imperial poet, was a response to the American take over of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War". 

The Wikipedia Talk page sometimes makes more exciting reading than the theme page itself.  Here's JHP's talk on the talk page for The White Man's Burden that neatly summarizes the poem:

THe poem basically says, "it's your unpleasant duty to go and drag these people kicking and screaming into the modern world. They don't want it. Your compatriots at home will profit from your efforts while despising you. You won't get rich and you'll probably die. But really, it has to be done, because in the long run, the people whose land you've taken will be better off, although the(y) will hate you for it."

At the very least, this poem's interpretations had been controversial and at one extreme the interpretation is racist pro-colonialist, and at the other extreme it is taken as a satire by the poet.

We Myanmars were not far behind in shouldering such burdens (and failed) as we often hear people with power and authority scorning the poor or the disadvantaged with the words "Holding by the nape of the neck and sent to the heavens (the abode of the nats or gods) jumped down with the excuse of a chilled bottom". These personages must be "planners" in the sense of Easterly.

William Russell Easterly is an American economist, specializing in economic growth and foreign aid.  He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank and then teaches at New York University. He is skeptical of foreign aid and is the author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Oxford University Press, 2006). He distinguishes two types of foreign aid donors:

"In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out whether the customer is satisfied."

Easterly is especially critical of fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs and his bestselling book The End of Poverty. In the Letters section of the Washington Post (March 27, 2005) Sach wrote:

William Easterly, who reviewed my book The End of Poverty (Book World, March 13), is notorious as the cheerleader for "can't-do" economics. For years as a World Bank staffer, he watched failed programs during the era of World Bank "structural adjustment lending" and reached the erroneous conclusion that any bold effort to help the poorest of the poor would fail. He wrongly made the Bank's shortcomings into a general theory. The World Bank has since moved on, but Easterly has not.

...

Easterly's call to do things piecemeal is vacuous. Shall we do vaccinations this decade, AIDS control the next, malaria control in the 2020s, clean drinking water in the 2030s, and food production in the 2040s? There is no reason why we can't help poor countries to invest in clinics, schools, roads and improved farms during the next 20 years. The size and scope of the requisite effort -- less than 0.7 percent of rich-world GNP (i.e., 70 cents on each $100 of GNP) -- is modest.

Easterly replies:

For example, Sachs says that modest sums would control malaria in Africa. Doesn't he have a little curiosity about why this easy problem wasn't solved with some of the $568 billion (in today's dollars) in foreign aid given to Africa over the last 43 years? His answer seems to be that there was too much aid going to emergency food relief (5 percent of rich-country aid to Africa from 1975 to 2003) and consultant salaries. It's intriguing that someone calling for (and providing) so much foreign technical advice to Africa (including advice on controlling malaria) implies that consultant salaries are a waste -- they were 25 percent of aid to Africa over 1975-2003. Anyway, if it takes so little, the other 70 percent of the aid budget should have had enough room to control malaria, but it didn't. And yet there was progress in other areas, like increased vaccination and access to clean water in Africa. Shouldn't we examine why these things worked and others didn't? The piecemeal approach doesn't mean less money or less effort for the poor; it means redirecting resources away from the utopian schemes at the top (that have already failed) toward rewarding those at the bottom who find things that work for the poor.

The noble laureate Amartya Sen called Easterly The Man Without a Plan (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006) because Easterly argues that in the fight against global poverty, "the right plan is to have no plan."

... Easterly's book offers a line of analysis that could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the literature on economic development. The wide-ranging and rich evidence -- both anecdotal and statistical -- that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration. In a less extreme form, they could have yielded an illuminating critical perspective on how and why things often do go wrong in the global efforts to help the world's poor.

...

There is much of merit in Easterly's perceptive vision about initiatives, incentives, and communication. We should be grateful to Easterly for the wealth of material he has presented, thereby enriching the development literature. We may have less reason to celebrate -- or even to accept -- the diagnosis of idiocy and obduracy he gives to those whom he calls "planners." But there is a strong case for judging a book by its best contributions, not its weakest points. My hope is that the "searchers" among the readers of The White Man's Burden will look for the convincing arguments Easterly does provide rather than for those he does not.

Simon Maxell, Director of Overseas Development Institute gave a kinder review than Sen and highlights Easterly's argument:

The argument is laid out over eleven chapters which set out to expand the proposition implied by the subtitle – ‘Why the West’s efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good’. The simple answer is that the West – from colonial days through to the modern era of aid – has favoured ‘planners’ rather than ‘searchers’. Planners have optimistic, over-arching goals (‘eliminate world poverty’) and are insensitive to the cultural and political underpinning of long-term development. Searchers respect context and empower individuals, especially through markets. Accountability is at the heart of it:

‘The tragedy of poverty is that the poorest people in the world have no money or political power to motivate Searchers to address their desperate needs . . . To make things even worse, aid bureaucrats . . . have the incentive to satisfy rich-country vanity with promises of transforming the Rest rather than simply helping poor individuals.’ (Pgs 146-7)

And he also commented on where the issues, prescriptions, or argument could be taken further such as different ways of raising the level of public control over public agencies (‘voice’) and the idea of contestability in public service delivery (‘choice’); direct and indirect support to democratization and greater political accountability: support for human rights commissions and a free press; investment in audit offices and freedom of information; peer review, and others.

As for the market paradigm which underpins the prescriptions in Easterly’s thinking, Easterly said:

‘markets emerge everywhere in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances . . . (as a result of) the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms’ (Pgs 53-4). Market reformers fail to take account of the need to build trust over time, of the importance of networks and of indigenous property rights. That’s why ‘you can’t plan a market’ (the title of Ch 3).

In Maxell's view:

Perhaps you can’t, but you can certainly ask who gains and who loses from markets, what the market failures might be, and what kinds of public good might be needed for markets to work. Market based development is of course central to all current thinking. However, it is instructive that there is no discussion of market failure in this book that I can find.

Easterly's latest book is The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014). Of this book The Duke Center for International Development, Duke University, USA hosted a panel discussion and debated its three main themes:

- whether international assistance promotes development and can help combat poverty or actually makes it worse by propping up bad governments; - the validity of the technocratic recommendations of international development experts; and

- the role of the market (and individual entrepreneurs) as a problem-solving system.

One panelist illustrated the book's thesis with an anecdote:

... a priest in a developing country who had been asked by a farmer for his advice on how to stop the mysterious death of some of his chickens: the priest offered various remedies, but all of the chickens died. He proclaimed it was “God’s will”. He likened this to Easterly’s thesis that development “experts” do not have solutions and cannot be held accountable – and the poor suffer..

One major question is whether development and poverty reduction are possible without individual rights and democracy:

Panelists, while expressing differing views, underlined that Easterly's provocative book reflected classical development challenges, including: whether aid can provide benefits even in countries with bad policies and weak institutions; whether there were generally applicable theories and “solutions” of development; how accountability can be built into situations where there are many actors and poor recipients have little political power.; and whether the international aid community had learned the right lessons from past experience. A major theme of the discussion was whether successful development and poverty reduction are possible without individual rights and democracy. The moderator recalled Amartya Sen's celebrated statement that "Democratic countries do not have famines."

And the requisites for a setting that is favorable:

The subsequent wide-ranging discussion with students and faculty in the audience underlined the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to development policy and project design, facilitated by an interactive process between international and local expertise that takes account of relevant political and social factors. "You need to create an environment that allows experimentation and spontaneous solutions", said one panelist. "You need to give space for competition, which requires the rule of law to ensure enforcement of contracts" said another.

With this book "Bill Easterly had once again issued a challenge to those who consider themselves development experts."

There has been a lot of material to read in the form of book review on the Web for the Tyranny of Experts. Skimming over a good many of them is a joyful experience, and I would say understanding every concept or every word in them is not a necessity, at least for me. For me Rights is a magical word, because when I have a right, I am myself, and I have an identity.

Duncan Green, Strategic Adviser, Oxfam GB has written Easterly's book review in IMF's Finance and Development, 2014 June issue entitled "Development by Way of Rights" and this later appeared with the title "Bill Easterly’s new book: brilliant on technocrats, flawed on rights, wrong on aid and hopeless on China" on Oxfam blog From Poverty to Power. This new descriptive title handed me the excuse to skip over it as anyone may reasonably guess what things are in there.

Another review of June 04, 2014 is by "world’s best-known critic of the development industry" Dhiraj Sharma Nyaupane of Washington, DC who argues that Aid and experts bring tyranny, and the only path to prosperity is through rights.  

May be it is best to leave the tedious work and the polemics of development to our saya-lays and ask them to deliver. Isn't that our right?

If our grandmother were still living and if you ask her what she wants I bet she would say "Cool myself with a fan and eat our leftover rice" as I heard it, not directly, but through my mother. It must have been an expression born out of going through hard times for insecure provincial families—a war, Japanese occupation, colonial days and being driven to urbanize.  

For some reason, even for the newer generations, a lot of us simply learnt not to ask much. Meanwhile there's always the law of karma to fall back on.