Making the world safe for Bill Easterly

Readers of this blog have seen me mention Bill Easterly on more than one occasion.  He’s relatively well known in the aid industry, but perhaps an introduction is warranted nonetheless.  He is an Economist, a prof at NYU, and co-director of the Development Research Institute.  He is well known for several things, including his AidWatch blog and his controversial book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. He is also has a reputation for being the chief nemesis of the “Spend-More-Now!” development school as loudly propagated by the likes of Bono, Geldof, and Sachs.  Easterly argues that the top-down, planned approaches to aid have been utter failures, and that relief for the world’s poor comes from entrepreneurial innovators and not from large donor bureaucracies trying to throw increasingly large amounts of money at the problem.  Prof. Easterly does a better job explaining his views in this short video:

Now, I’ve never met the man, though we have re-tweeted each other which is the modern equivalent of a polite nod across the smoke-filled dining room of a 19^th century gentleman’s club.  (God how we’ve descended as a society…)  Nonetheless, I am a fan.  I confess, a large part of this is because I thoroughly enjoy watching grandiose windbags being tweaked on the nose.  But the base of my enthusiasm is my strongly held belief that the aid industry is broken, and it won’t be fixed unless there are more people like Prof. Easterly willing to point this out publically and loudly.

But there aren’t more people like him, and there is a reason for this.  We are almost all hopelessly compromised by the system.  Virtually everyone in this industry is beholden to the large institutional and government donors.  We receive our funding from agencies that have implemented the very policies that have largely failed to improve the lives of the world’s poor decade after decade.  And these agencies are prickly.  They aren’t fond of giving money to people who are also saying “Agency X is wasting billions!”  So we tend to keep our mouth shut, or occasionally speak out anonymously.  But we never shout from the mountaintops with the same frank fury as Bill Easterly.

Rajiv Shah: Not your parent's USAID Director

Enter Rajiv Shah, stage right.  Shah, formerly at the Gates Foundation, is the new USAID head and is possibly one of the most powerful people in the entire development industry.  And he’s been saying some crazy things lately.   For example, he gave a speech on Friday at the National Press Club where he preached the loud gospel of reform.  He keeps talking about entrepreneurial solutions, trying new ideas, and throwing out the old game plan.  If he actually means it, then this could be a sea change for the industry.  Perhaps more importantly, it would allow other USAID partners to speak out against the waste and mismanagement of aid, without fearing that their funding will dry up.  It may make the world safe for more Bill Easterlys, in other words.  As Martha Stewart says “…that’s a good thing.”

Tags Aid Effectiveness, aid reform, Bill Easterly, donors, new ideas, Raj Shah, USAID, waste