Bill Easterly

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May 8, 2012 | 11:31 AM | By

The fight over America giving itself foreign aid

Flickr, Meredith_Farmer

One of the most inefficient and frequently counterproductive aspects of American foreign aid is our tendency to give aid to ourselves — experts call it “tied aid” — rather than directly giving it to those poor folks and communities overseas we are trying to assist.

Obviously, we don’t say that’s what we’re doing.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, has long been criticized in development circles for this tendency we have to give foreign aid to ourselves. Lately, under Rajiv Shah, the agency appears to have been making a serious effort to reduce this bad habit — untying aid — by allowing USAID to directly fund local organizations in the countries we are trying to help.

As The Guardian reported in February USAID Now Free to Buy Goods in Developing Countries

The US agency for international development, USAid, will no longer have to “buy American”, thanks to a policy change that will open up the agency’s contracts to firms in developing countries and could herald a significant shift in how the world’s largest aid donor does business.

Well, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Bill Easterly, Congress, foreign aid, Oxfam
March 29, 2012 | 10:35 AM | By

Stop saying silly things like Dr. Jim Kim is ‘anti-growth’

Analysis

Dr. Jim Kim

President Barack Obama’s nomination of renowned physician activist Dr. Jim Kim to become head of the World Bank is controversial – apparently because he’s both a physician and an outspoken advocate for a particular approach to fighting poverty.

This has led all sorts of development experts — most of them economists — to give at best faint praise to Kim as a “good person” but then go on to damn him for not having the right kind of knowledge and/or expertise to run this institution devoted to promoting overseas development.

Many of my favorite development (economics) experts like Bill Easterly and Chris Blattman point to a book co-authored by Kim called Dying for Growth, in which he and his colleagues “present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

Blattman cites another opponent of Kim’s nomination, Lant Pritchett, who says:

Kim’s views against economic growth and private investment (detailed in his book, Dying for Growth) are already raising eyebrows in the press and causing concern among world leaders.

Oh dear me! The proposed head of the World Bank is “against growth!” Really? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Amanda Glassman, Bill Easterly, Chris Blattman, Jim Kim, José Antonio Ocampo, Lant Pritchett, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, World Bank
November 22, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

The case for divorcing foreign aid from military support

AidWatch

Bill Easterly

Development expert and economist Bill Easterly, writing in The Guardian, argues that A firewall should be built between U.S. foreign aid and national security. Says Easterly:

US foreign aid programs should be for poverty relief and should not be taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building.

Easterly said the foreign aid budget was significantly increased under President George W. Bush and enjoyed wide bipartisan support in Congress until recently. So what happened to turn foreign aid into Congress’ favorite punching bag in the budget battle these days?

The answer is that the US aid program was taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) wound up in the most self-destructive position – the unsuccessful cover-up…. The resultant failures overshadowed notable successes in more traditional aid programmes like health. These disasters and the neglect of more feasible poverty relief failed to sustain the compassionate constituency evident earlier in the decade.

I’ve written about this issue several times before, when the Arab Spring came to Egypt and many of us learned how much of our “aid” to Egypt had been actually going for military equipment in support of the Mubarak dictatorship. Here was a story the next day in The Guardian noting the risk of mixing up defense and aid.

For comparison purposes, here’s a chart from GOOD comparing how much we spend on aid vs. the military.

Easterly says it’s clear most Americans want to help the poor overseas. He contends the only way we can rescue foreign aid is to disentangle it from our national security interests:

Compassionate American taxpayers continue to make private donations at a rate higher than any other nationality in the world. The bipartisan coalition that came together to increase aid in 2002 may be nearly extinct, but it could be resurrected by redirecting aid to where it has a decent chance of working. Aid will not get too many more chances.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Bill Easterly, foreign aid, foreign policy, military
September 29, 2011 | 10:46 AM | By

Bill Easterly: One of the nicest aid grumps you’d ever want to meet

Tom Paulson

Bill Easterly at Bruno's Bakery

While in New York last week to cover a (potentially) historic United Nations meeting on global health, the Clinton Global Initiative and other confabs aimed at devising grand and ambitious schemes to help the world’s poor, I figured I should go talk to a guy famously skeptical of such things.

Bill Easterly: Aid grump

Easterly is the author of several provocative books such as The White Man’s Burden and an NYU professor of economics. He got into academics after leaving the World Bank due to a celebrated flap over freedom of expression (his expression of what he felt were failed World Bank policies and the bank’s claim that he violated protocol by saying so).

Bill Gates also doesn’t think too highly of Easterly’s ideas (You’ll have to read down to the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article stating that Gates “hated” Easterly’s book. Here’s Easterly’s rebuttal). Gates continues to be a staunch defender of the value of foreign aid and the moral obligation of wealthier countries to assist the poor.

To brutally summarize Easterly’s views, he doesn’t think foreign aid works very well and development (which he distinguishes from aid) is often done more to serve the interests of donors and Western government or corporate interests rather than, and usually at the expense of, the poor.

He doesn’t believe in Big Ideas or large-scale “top-down” assistance programs — basically, most of what I was in New York to cover at the UN, the Clinton Global Initiative and other such events.

So I met him at Bruno’s Bakery near NYU to ask him a few questions before he ran off to play the French version of bocce ball (I think it’s called pétanque). Easterly’s very soft-spoken and chuckles a lot. Didn’t come across like a crank at all. Here’s what he had to say: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Bill Easterly, Bill Gates, foreign aid, United Nations
December 13, 2010 | 8:00 AM | By

Bono is no champion of change, says development expert

Flickr, Globetoppers

Not compared to John Lennon anyway.

“Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not,” says NYU Professor Bill Easterly, a popular and often controversial voice on the development and foreign aid scene.

In an article for Sunday’s Washington Post, Easterly marked the 30th anniversary of Lennon’s death by challenging the commonly held view that U2′s lead singer Bono (aka Paul David Hewson) is a crusader for the poor who challenges the powerful and holds politicians to account.

Lennon did, the NYU economist says, but not Bono:

Lennon’s protests against the war in Vietnam so threatened the U.S. government that he was hounded by the FBI, police and immigration authorities. He was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, supporting specific technical solutions to global poverty.

He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders – or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary – than he is to call them out in a meaningful way.

AidWatch

Bill Easterly

While there is something to be admired in the celebrity dissident, Easterly says Bono is simply ridiculous as a “celebrity wonk.” Easterly goes on to say:

While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed.

While Bono champions “technical” solutions to ending poverty, Easterly said, Lennon directly challenged the powerful — and paid dearly for it.

Well, it’s a bit harsh. And kind of curious since Easterly is himself sort of a wonk. But as an academic who likes a rousing good debate, he notes on his blog AidWatch that, by far, most of those responding to his article completely disagree with him. Here’s one such commenter, Crawford:

I couldn’t disagree more with your article about Lennon vs Bono. Most people are sick of celebrities making generalizations about causes and not knowing a whole lot about what they are talking about. Any twat can take a “stand” on something and becauce they are famous get attention for it. Bono actually knows his stuff and to say that he just smoozes with the big wigs and follows the status quo shows you know little about Bono. He understands to get things done you have to meet with people you disagree with. Bono has been more effective at getting money, getting policy changed, etc etc. than any other activist in the history of celebrity activists.

It’s well worth reading Easterly’s article, and the response he got. His critical comparison of Lennon vs. Bono appears to have prompted the Guardian to ask its readers to chime in by answering the question: Do celebrities have a role to play in development?

The answer is yes, of course, since we see them everywhere playing those roles — Angelina Jolie in Haiti, Clooney in Sudan and so on. The real question is if the celebrity is using his or her status to help in a crisis or if appearing in a crisis is aimed at helping the celebrity’s status.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Bill Easterly, Bono, poverty
October 25, 2010 | 9:32 AM | By

Book: Ethiopia as a case study of how not to do foreign aid

Wikipedia

I haven’t yet read the book, but it’s getting lots of attention for making the case that governance trumps all other factors when it comes to development.

We have a large and vibrant Ethiopian community in Seattle and I’d be interested to hear what they think about all this. Ethiopia gets a lot of aid from the U.S. and has recently been criticized for using it as a political weapon rather than helping its poor.

The book is “Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid” by Peter Gill. Live Aid was the event organized in 1985 by the much-heralded and much-maligned musician Bob Geldof in response to a famine in Ethiopia.

The development skeptics at Aidwatch have a post on it, noting both Bill Easterly’s review in the Wall Street Journal and another by David Rieff in the Atlantic. Here’s what Easterly says:

If it were possible to sum up in one sentence Ethiopia’s struggles with famine over the past quarter-century, I’d suggest this: It’s not the rains, it’s the rulers. As Peter Gill makes clear in “Famines and Foreigners,” his well-turned account of the country’s miseries since the 1984-85 famine and the Live Aid concert meant to relieve it, drought has not been as devastating to Ethiopians as their own autocratic governments.

And Rieff says:

There are fundamentally two views of development aid, and they are incompatible. The first … is essentially that, after many false starts, we now know how to do development, and that what is lacking is political commitment and money from the donor side, and political commitment and fiscal responsibility on the part of the governments and the elites of the recipient countries. The opposing view is that, no matter our good intentions, and the literally tens of thousands of people in development ministries, relief groups, international and local development NGOs, and popular movements, we still do not know what we are doing.

Hmmm, I’m not sure there are the only two views of development aid.

Another view might be that we don’t quite know, or can’t agree on, what we’re doing in development (which often seems to be the case for most human endeavors) and yet it remains a necessary counterbalance to massive global inequity.

Here’s the author’s blog post on the book.

FILED UNDER: Justice, Politics, Bill Easterly, Bob Geldof, David Rieff, development, Ethiopia
September 22, 2010 | 8:30 AM | By

Two economists battle over aid

Millennium Development Goals

I am not an economist, but even I can figure out that how development money is disbursed can have almost as much impact on success or failure as what it is spent on.

As the UN anti-poverty confab — the UN Millennium Development Goals Summit — winds down, I thought it worth pointing out these two economists arguing over how we approach foreign assistance.

The first article (requires a free subscription to the Financial Times) is by Jeffrey Sachs, at Columbia University.

Sachs makes the case that foreign aid will be more efficient if we truly collaborate and pool funding into multilateral initiatives like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Here is Sachs’ article.

The second article is by another New York economist, William Easterly, at New York University. Easterly points out that the last anti-poverty goal — MDG 8, basically aimed at developing fair trade –  has largely been ignored. Easterly thinks business development is the way to go and direct assistance programs (like the Global Fund) are not.

He notes that truly committing to MDG 8 would mean calling for, among other things, an end to “rich countries perpetuating barriers that favor a tiny number of their businesses at the expense of impoverished millions elsewhere.”

Here is Easterly’s article.

FILED UNDER: Basics, Politics, Bill Easterly, Jeffrey Sachs, millennium development goals
July 15, 2010 | 12:23 PM | By

Is Bill Easterly losing it?

I can’t answer that. It could be just that the whole discipline of economics suffers from what could be called “hypothesitis” — a pathological tendency to propose half-baked ideas.

Easterly is a well-known NYU economist who is often worth reading as a useful counterpoint to some of the soft-headed chatter on matters of international development.

But, I had to laugh when I read a post on Easterly’s blog in which he suggests that Africa’s technological state of affairs today was predetermined by where it was technologically in 1,000 BC. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Bill Easterly, development