International development is hot right now. Columbia University economist Jeff Sachs’ book The End of Poverty was a New York Times bestseller. Celebrities like Bono have brought unprecedented media attention to the issue. “I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for…what we did—or did not do—to put the fire out in Africa,” Bono told lawmakers in Washington last year. Foreign aid proponents like Bono, Sachs, and Bill Gates speak to the notion that wealthy countries have an obligation to devote massive amounts of resources to wage a grand, all-out war on poverty. For them, international development is about fundamentally changing the human condition. As Bono went on to say in his address, “I have a messianic complex.”

In light of the romance of international development, former World Bank economist William Easterly introduces his book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by admitting, “I feel kind of like a Scrooge.” That’s because Easterly points out that the $2.3 trillion of foreign aid that the West has given over the past fifty years has failed to eliminate poverty, disease, corruption, and lack of education around the world. He argues that the empirical link between aid and economic growth is murky at best and that aid still lines the pockets of corrupt and brutal dictators despite many attempts at reform.

The problem, according to Easterly, lies with a group he calls “Planners.” Planners are Westerners who devise grand schemes like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that are intended to be the solutions for the poor’s myriad of complex problems—a top-down approach that Easterly considers patronizing. Easterly contends that grand plans to eliminate poverty render responsibility diffuse for the uncoordinated alphabet soup of multilateral, bilateral, and non-governmental development agencies. This system continues because Planners are accountable to voters and governments in the West, rather than people in developing countries.

Easterly’s example of mosquito nets best illustrates his view. Jeff Sachs heralds the donation of insecticide-treated mosquito nets as a cheap way for Western countries to help sub-Saharan Africans prevent malaria. But Easterly points out that many poor people do not assign any value to them because they have been doled out; consequently, they are rarely used. In fact, mosquito nets often end up on the black market for use as fishing nets and wedding veils. But when a Malawian health care worker began selling mosquito nets to the poor (albeit at a subsidized price), mosquito net use skyrocketed and malaria transmission plummeted.

That Malawian health care worker is an example of what Easterly calls a “Searcher.” Searchers are local social entrepreneurs who are accountable to the poor and who therefore must pay attention to what they want. Instead of devising grand plans, Searchers identify one specific problem and then find one specific solution: like the Chinese village of Xiaogong that decided to stop collectivized farming, or the Bangladeshi banker who invented microcredit by offering small loans to the poor. Though their individual efforts are piecemeal, in the aggregate they offer the best hope for lifting their nations out of poverty. Their work is a homegrown, market-based approach to development, the kind that has flourished in the booming economies of South and East Asia.

The White Man’s Burden is a book that deserves much more attention than it has received because it transcends the traditional debate on foreign aid. He is neither an idealist like Bono nor a curmudgeon like former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who called foreign aid “pouring money down foreign rat holes.” Rather, Easterly shifts the debate. He never questions whether the West should give aid; he questions how it should. For Easterly, the answer is to support Searchers rather than to create some grand design to save the world.

Easterly’s book proves comprehensively and eloquently that grand blueprints like the MDGs are nothing more than sexy, attention- grabbing means of assuaging liberal white guilt. Such unapologetically contrarian views make The White Man’s Burden a powerful apotheosis to the Gospel of Bono.

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