Aug 18 2007
The White Man’s Burden – Why The West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
Jim Miles reviews William Easterly’s book
8/18/07
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.”