MONDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Dr. Easterly's site
• Article by Dr. Easterly
• Review of The White Man's Burden
• Center for Global Development

E-mail a friend

Tavis: William Easterly is a Professor of Economics at NYU and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. He's worked extensively on issues facing developing countries in places like Africa and Latin America and also spent sixteen years with the World Bank. His latest book is called "The White Man's Burden: Why the West Efforts to Aid and the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.' Professor Easterly, nice to have you on the program.

William Easterly: Good to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you here, man. I'm struggling to get this subtitle out and what really grabs my attention is the title, "The White Man's Burden.' Tell me why you named it "The White Man's Burden.'

Easterly: Well, Tavis, this is some sarcasm directed at the rich white men who run the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who think they know best what the rest of the world needs, who think that they are the saviors of the rest of the world.

Tavis: Is that in part what fuels the kind of outrage we see directed at the World Bank and at IMF? This arrogance?

Easterly: Yeah, I think the arrogance fuels a lot of it, but especially when it's coupled with lack of results. You know, this $2.3 trillion dollars in foreign aid that has gone to poor countries and yet achieved so little in the way of raising peoples' living standards or alleviating deadly diseases. It's a tragedy.

Tavis: Let's jump right into that because I've said that at the opening of the show. You've now said it. We're talking over two trillion dollars and your argument in "The White Man's Burden" that it hasn't gotten much done.

Easterly: No, no.

Tavis: Explain.

Easterly: Well, the sad thing is that, if you take Africa, for example, the average African nation is just as poor today as it was forty years ago before all this foreign aid. The foreign aid to Africa alone is $568 billion dollars over the last forty years and Africans are still just as poor as they were forty years ago.

Tavis: So what's the problem here? If we're spending - because you know the typical answer is that we're not spending enough money. We hear that all the time. Whatever the problem is, I don't care who the group or organization is, the problem is always we ain't spending enough money. Sometimes that is the case, but if that's not the case here, then why is the money so badly spent? Why are the results so lacking?

Easterly: Well, that is the mindset in foreign aid. The amount of money spent is taken as the main indicator of success in foreign aid, which is ridiculous when you think about it. The amount of money spent would not be a sane indicator of how good a Hollywood movie was by how much you spent on making it. What counts is whether the customer is satisfied. The customer in this case, the poor, cannot be satisfied because they are just as poor today as they were four decades ago.

Tavis: One could argue, though, given the level of abject poverty that is faced by so many people in so many parts of the world, that it does in fact require more than just money. So at a certain level, whose responsibility is that? Whose fault is that? Is it IMF? Is it the World Bank? I mean, money can't be - to your point, if money can't just be the solution, then what ought not be criticized for not giving more and more and more?

Easterly: Well, the problem with the aid system is that it seems to be designed so that no one takes responsibility for achieving any results. You know, the IMF and the World Bank say, well, it's not our fault. It's the fault of the poor country governments. They didn't follow our advice. They're corrupt, etc. The poor country governments can marshal national sentiment and blame the IMF and the World Bank. The other donors get blamed too.

Everyone blames everyone else. No one is individually responsible for achieving one single thing in foreign aid, Tavis. That's the tragedy of it and that's why good results don't happen. Something so simple as getting twelve-cent medicines to children that are dying from malaria? That's not happening. The money is spent, but the money doesn't get the twelve-cent medicines to children that are dying from malaria, so there are a million deaths from malaria.

Tavis: So let me ask the obvious question then. What ought to be done? What do we do to restructure the way the money is spent? Because you can't convince me that $2.3 trillion dollars is peanuts. I mean, that's a lot of money.

Easterly: That's a lot of money.

Tavis: So we agree on that at least.

Easterly: It should have accomplished a lot more.

Tavis: All right, so tell me what needs to be done to restructure the way that foreign aid works so that the results are something we can be proud of.

Easterly: Well, the first step, Tavis, is something that sounds very boring, but is incredibly important to get incentives right for aid agencies like the World Bank. That is, just have independent evaluation of whether they are getting the money to the poor and getting results or not, like getting those twelve-cent medicines to the malaria victims. Amazingly enough, what we have now is aid agencies evaluating themselves.

You know, it's sort of like the same thing Enron was doing with its accounting (laughter). You know, they got some cooperative accountants to kind of blow up the picture to make it look very nice and that's what in effect the World Bank and other aid agencies do. They evaluate themselves. No one else evaluates them. Can you believe that $2.3 trillion dollars is spent and nobody was doing any independent evaluation of whether this money was actually reaching the poor? But that's what happened.

Tavis: I suspect if I were talking to somebody right now from the World Bank or IMF, they would say, "Professor Easterly, with all due respect, what would the situation be like if there were no World Bank, if there were no IMF?" And to that, you would say what?

Easterly: Well, I think they have accomplished some good. I don't think it's one hundred percent wasted. There has been some progress in health. Infant mortality has fallen. Not enough because, you know, half the malaria deaths could have been prevented with those twelve-cent medicines. But there has been some progress there. But on the big issues, on sort of achieving prosperity for very poor nations, that just has totally failed to happen.

Tavis: Are there examples where, for one reason or another, we have achieved or the kind of success has been achieved that you think is noteworthy, country specifically?

Easterly: Yeah, there are countries that have achieved a lot of success, but it's not through foreign aid. It's on their own. You know, the main secret of long-run prosperity seems to be homegrown efforts to do political reforms, to foster democracy, to do promotion of private business so that it can, you know, create new jobs and opportunities for poor people.

So there are nations like Botswana in Africa that have grown enormously over the past four decades by their own efforts. There are the famous East Asian examples like Singapore and South Korea, more recently China and India. While we're all agonizing over whether foreign aid is enough this year - there are proposals to increase it by ten billion here or there - the citizens of India and China together increased their incomes by $715 billion dollars last year just by their own efforts.

Tavis: With regard to the United States specifically - you talk about the IMF and the World Bank - with regard to the United States specifically, tell me what we do right where our foreign aid is concerned and what we do wrong where our foreign aid is concerned primarily.

Easterly: Well, the answer about what we do right is going to be a fairly short answer (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) The professor's got jokes, okay. So we move past that now. No, but seriously, there's something we do right.

Easterly: Well, there's a new way to give foreign aid called the Millennium Challenge Corporation that was started by the Bush administration which takes a fairly obvious idea, but it's actually trying to implement it in practice which is "Don't give money to corrupt autocrats. Give money to governments that have demonstrated some willingness to act in the interest of their own citizens."

Tavis: Imagine that (laughter).

Easterly: The implementation is still a little shaky on how that's really working, but it's a good idea anyway.

Tavis: Before you move to what we do wrong, this is funny and yet not funny. That seems like something that is commonsensical. My grandmother, big momma, would put it this way. It's just too much like right. It's too much like right for people to do. But it makes such sense that people wouldn't do it. I've never been able to figure - I'm not being naïve in the stating of this obvious reality, I think, but we have historically given money to so many bad people over the years that you would think that we would have gotten it by now. I mean, all around the country. We're just passing out money to people who we know are thugs, and we keep giving them money.

Easterly: Yeah, it's really sad that such an obvious idea has taken so long to affect practice. Actually, the idea has changed, but so far the reality on the ground has not really changed. There's still just as much money going to corrupt autocrats as there is to democratic clean governments.

Tavis: Would that be the answer? Would the inverse be the answer to what we do wrong, which is that we give money to too many thuggish dictators?

Easterly: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the leading recipient of foreign aid today in the world is Pakistan which is, you know, an autocracy source of Muslim extremism on the brink of civil war in Balujistan. You know, that's hardly a model government.

Tavis: Let me close with this question. I hope there's an answer to this question. I hate having these conversations on television even when the issues seem so big and seem so complex. I can't look in that camera or have you look in the camera, more accurately, and say to the audience, "Here's what we can do about it." So something this big, this bad, this massive, what does the average person watching this show do about something like this?

Easterly: Well, there's a lot of political activism that achieves good results. You have to select what cause you want to be active on behalf of. The cause that's been selected up to now has just been raising more money to spend on the poor, but that is a cause that hasn't really worked to get the money to the poor. So why don't we instead substitute the cause to get the money that is spent on foreign aid actually reaching the poor? If people demand an independent evaluation, if they demanded accountability of the people spending their aid dollars that the money really reach the poor, that the twelve-cent medicines really reach the malaria victims, then I think we could see real change and real hope.

Tavis: It's a hopeful place to end our conversation for a very complex problem. The new book by Professor William Easterly, "The White Man's Burden: Why the West Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good." Got it right that time. Nice to have you on the program. Stay right there in that seat.

Easterly: Thank you.

Tavis: Up next on this program, actor Seth Green. Stay with us.