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Senior Research Fellow Peter Boettke reviews William Easterly's "White Man's Burden"
October 11, 2006
South African Journal of International Affairs
Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Peter Boettke reviews William Easterly's new book White Man's Burden in the South African Journal of International Affairs. The central argument of White Man's Burden is that we must distinguish between "planners" and "searchers" or "top-down" vs. "bottom-up" approaches to development. Easterly provides case after case in which the grand plans of the planners have gone astray and had unintended and undesirable consequences throughout the developing world, while searchers have discovered amazing new opportunities for wealth creation and thus have generated unintended, though desirable, consequences. By using the local knowledge of economic actors and aligning incentives to the local context, bottom-up approaches out compete the best top-down plans by experts in their own countries as well as those of the experts in international aid organizations.
