Lately, there have been a lot of fancy summits and conferences on AIDS, poverty, globalization, global warming… but it seems like most of those areas are in the midst of crisis rather than in recovery. The summits, the lofty goals, the thousand page manuals don’t make people richer and healthier in and of themselves.

For generations, now, we westerners have assumed cultural superiority and attempted to impose our values and core institutions in all other parts of the world. Some chunk of that has been well-meaning — a lot of us are honestly concerned about the health, safety and life expectancy of all global citizens. But even purely altruistic endeavors have failed to make life better for those we’re supposedly helping. This has pretty much been completely baffling to me.

Reading Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty, it seems clear that the problem is just that western countries have been corrupt and lazy in their approach to aid and that if only everyone read the darn book and got excited about it Everything Would Be Fine. By 2015.

Easterly paints a much grimmer picture, but it seems a lot closer to my version of reality. He really helped me understand how it is that with billions of dollars spent on aid, conditions continue to worsen for a lot of people. His argument is essentially that failure of aid efforts can be attributed to leadership being far from those they are attempting to assist and looking primarily for politically helpful, high-visibility projects with no accountability to the poor. The aid industry is full of “Planners” who feel they know what’s best for everyone and would rather have highly advertised meetings than to get someone to shovel shit out of a Lagos ditch.

The great thing about this book is that Easterly lays out a bunch of case studies of things that have worked. There are plenty of examples of “Searchers” who never set out to save the planet but simply worked their darnest to find a localized solution to a localized problem and succeeded. Little things can go a long way, he argues.

One of the reasons I love Seattle so much is that there are a lot of Searchers here trying to find ways to improve everyone’s lives a little. I’m particularly impressed by the University District Service Provider Alliance (maybe just because I know them best). UDSPA loosely brings together a bunch of organizations providing different services for the homeless population. There’s a shelter, there’s a clinic, there’s a meal program… each institution is highly specialized. The loose grouping brings an incredible amount of value to each individual service because they can easily refer patrons to each other and provide consistent information, staffing, safety… most importantly, I think, they can each focus energy on what they do best knowing that someone else is doing an equally good job in other areas. There’s huge value to the Teen Feed program easily being able to alert all other organizations of a violence outbreak. If a shelter volunteer can specifically refer a guest he or she has known for a long time to an acquaintance at the 45th street clinic, the guest can be much more trusting that his/her cocaine habit won’t be revealed to the cops as soon as s/he goes in for help regarding an infection of some sort. Since the education access group knows that they can refer people to local shelters and clinics, they don’t have to worry about providing basic needs and can instead focus on education.

International aid tends to work in a highly centralized fashion. It’s not working. Maybe something should change and maybe there’s something to learn fro UDSPA’s successes.

So. A friend told me this was required reading after The End of Poverty. I agree.

“There is now a regular cycle in the literature on foreign aid and growth. Someone will survey the evidence and find that foreign aid does not produce growth. There will be some to-and-fro in the literature, in the course of which a few studies will find a positive effect of aid on growth. Foreign aid agencies will then seize upon the positive effect, usually focusing on only one study, and will publicize it widely. Researchers will examine the one positive result more carefully and find that it is spurious.”

“…any government that is powerful enough to protect citizens against predators is also powerful enough to be a predator itself.”

“Rich-country politicians control the foreign aid agencies. [...] The big problem already noted is that the principal is the rich-country politician and not the real customers, the poor in poor countries. Voters in the rich country and their representatives are the ones who choose the actions of the foreign aid agency. They love the Big Plans, the promises of easy solutions, the utopian dreams, the side benefits for rich-country political or economic interests, all of which hands the aid agency impossible tasks.”

“The military is even more insulated from the interests of the poor than aid agencies are. People don’t give reliable feedback at gunpoint. Invading soldiers and covert destabilization are not great ways to ascertain local peoples’ interests. The poor on the receiving end have few votes on whether they want the Americans to save them.”

“Nor is self-reliance a magical panacea for poor people — many unlucky poor people, no matter how hardworking, live in states run by gangsters or simply in complex societies that have not yet discovered the elusive path to development. Western assistance, suitably humbled and chastened by the experience of the past, can still play some role in alleviating the sufferings of the poor.”