Book Review: The White Man's Burder
I recently finished reading William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good . Reading some reviews online before starting it I was expecting it to be much more of a screed than it actually was. Easterly criticizes the efforts of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to further the development of poorer countries but his nuanced criticisms are in sharp contrast to most of their critics. There's a lot of discussion about all the complicated moving parts that go into a modern commercial society, all the problems with both causing trust and causing trust to be justified between commercial actors and how people have found ad hoc solutions in the absence of regular institutions, and how it's very hard to know in advance which interventions will actually make things better rather than just funnel money into someone's pocket. He provides some fairly compelling statistics showin...