Save the World: Do Nothing

William Easterly is the author of one of the most entertaining book on international development, The Elusive Quest for Growth. He's witty and has an original opinion in this milieu: aid doesn't work. In terms of name recongnition, he must be second only to Peter Bauer in defending this opinion. Easterly is Jeffrey Sachs' nemesis.

Easterly, preparing the release of a new book, makes his point in the Washington Post today: The West Can't Save Africa. Here's the sentence that says it all:

Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders.

He's convincing: decades of foreign aid later, Africa (and many other countries) is still in a poor state. It's about to take them longer than the West to lift out of poverty, despite all our good intentions. There has to be a better way and maybe it's to leave them alone.

The problem is that Easterly's doesn't address the fundamental questions for Westerners: What can we do to help? How is it that our wealth can't be of any help in this war on poverty? Are we suppose to look at wars, diseases that can be cured and lifelong poverty without lifting a finger?

Our rich nations have multiple social nets for their own poor: we subsidize education, many offer healthcare, there's unemployment insurance. Despite - or thanks to - all of those subsidies, rich nations have developed roundly in the last centuries. If we consider the world as one large country where the rich is obliged to the poor - be it for the morals or the economic value - we might draw lessons on how to help the poor without removing the incentives to get out of poverty.

(Thanks to the PSD Blog for drawing my attention to the Washington Post article)