The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

In the first chapter, Easterly sets up his core argument in contrasting the Planners versus the Searchers. The Planners approach the world’s problems traditionally, motivating others but failing to provide a specific strategy and take responsibility for plans that writhed of all the “pretensions of utopian social engineering” (15). They believe transformation can be achieved by an outside organization or Western assistance through top-down mechanisms. In trying to address what Easterly calls the first tragedy—extreme global poverty and other related-problems—they contribute to the second tragedy, the fruitless cost of aid: “the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths” (4). For Easterly, Planners include institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations and related-agencies

Easterly then explains that Searchers are the individuals or organizations on the ground, who use a bottom-up approach and are responsive to feedback and accountability measures. Unlike the Planners, the Searchers are agents for change that constantly look for ways they can deliver their products and services using the local

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