The White Man's Burden

In his book State of Fear, Michael Crichton says that humans have demonstrated themselves to be supremely arrogant in dealing with the environment. Believing that they know best how to solve apparent environmental ills, they have instead often succeeded only in making the situation worse. A prime example cited in the book is that of Yellowstone National Park.

As Crichton says on his website:

What actually happened at Yellowstone is a cascade of ego and error. But to understand it, we have to go back to the 1890s. Back then it was believed that elk were becoming extinct, and so these animals were fed and encouraged.

Over the next few years the numbers of elk in the park exploded. Roosevelt had seen a few thousand animals, and noted they were more numerous than on his last visit.

By 1912, there were 30,000. By 1914, 35,000. Things were going very well. Rainbow trout had also been introduced, and though they crowded out the native cutthroats, nobody really worried. Fishing was great. And bears were increasing in numbers, and moose, and bison. By 1915, Roosevelt realized the elk had become a problem, and urged "scientific management." His advice was ignored. Instead, the park service did everything it could to increase their numbers.
The results were predictable.

Antelope and deer began to decline, overgrazing changed the flora, aspen and willows were being eaten heavily and did not regenerate. In an effort to stem the loss of animals, the park rangers began to kill predators, which they did without public knowledge.

They eliminated the wolf and cougar and were well on their way to getting rid of the coyote. Then a national scandal broke out; studies showed that it wasn’t predators that were killing the other animals.

It was overgrazing from too many elk. The management policy of killing predators had only made things worse.

Meanwhile the environment continued to change. Aspen trees, once plentiful in the park, where virtually destroyed by the enormous herds of hungry elk. With the aspen gone, the beaver had no trees to make dams, so they disappeared. Beaver were essential to the water management of the park; without dams, the meadows dried hard in summer, and still more animals vanished. Situation worsened. It became increasingly inconvenient that all the predators had been killed off by 1930. So in the 1960s, there was a sigh of relief when new sightings by rangers suggested that wolves were returning.

There were also persistent rumors that rangers were trucking them in; but in any case, the wolves vanished soon after; they needed a diet of beaver and other small rodents, and the beaver had gone.

Etc.

Just as our handling of the environment is often taken with a "we know best" attitude, so too does the West often approach the subject of foreign aid with frequent breathtaking arrogance according to William Easterly in his book The White Man's Burden : Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Proving the adage that the road that leads to hell is paved with good intentions, Easterly says in the process of attempting to aid the third world that the West's efforts instead often meet with the opposite effect. (Kind of like the federal government and poverty) Often imposing top-down solutions on societies that they have only the most superficial understandings of, the policies of Western aid planners frequently result in side effects that wreak havoc on those they intend to help.

As the publisher's description of the book says:

William Easterly's The White Man's Burden is about what its author calls the twin tragedies of global poverty. The first, of course, is that so many are seemingly fated to live horribly stunted, miserable lives and die such early deaths. The second is that after fifty years and more than $2.3 trillion in aid from the West to address the first tragedy, it has shockingly little to show for it. We'll never solve the first tragedy, Easterly argues, unless we figure out the second.

The ironies are many: We preach a gospel of freedom and individual accountability, yet we intrude in the inner workings of other countries through bloated aid bureaucracies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that are accountable to no one for the effects of their prescriptions. We take credit for the economic success stories of the last fifty years, like South Korea and Taiwan, when in fact we deserve very little. However, we reject all accountability for pouring more than half a trillion dollars into Africa and other regions and trying one 'big new idea' after another, to no avail. Most of the places in which we've meddled are in fact no better off or are even worse off than they were before. Could it be that we don't know as much as we think we do about the magic spells that will open the door to the road to wealth?

Absolutely, William Easterly thunders in this angry, irreverent, and important book. He contrasts two approaches: (1) the ineffective planners' approach to development-never able to marshal enough knowledge or motivation to get the overambitious plans implemented to attain the plan's arbitrary targets and (2) a more constructive searchers' approach-always on the lookout for piecemeal improvements to poor peoples' well-being, with a system to get more aid resources to those who find things that work. Once we shift power and money from planners to searchers, there's much we can do that's focused and pragmatic to improve the lot of millions, such as public health, sanitation, education, roads, and nutrition initiatives. We need to face our own history of ineptitude and learn our lessons, especially at a time when the question of our ability to 'build democracy,' to transplant the institutions of our civil society into foreign soil so that they take root, has become one of the most pressing we face.

As I could go on and on about this fascinating book I will try to focus on just one aspect: I think the book makes a very convincing case for a libertarian foreign policy of non-interference, and engages in a short history of foreign attempts to remake the societies of other countries. Perhaps the most tragic example of that of Africa, where arbitrary lines formed new countries with little respect to ethnic realities. Like their European counterparts in the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, many Africans have apparently failed to realize that diversity is a strength, and the result has been conflict and misery.

Other attempts include U.S. interventions in the Philippines and Haiti, neither of which can be said to have met with much success.

Where countries have succeeded in turning around their affairs the solution is often internal. Perhaps the most stunning examples of which are the current rise of both China and India.

What then does this mean for Iraq? The truthful answer is that I'm not sure. What I'd like to believe is that the current effort in Iraq is not one that is designed to remake Iraqi society. That surely will fail. Rather, it's the removal of a brutal tyrant that will enable the Iraqis to remake their society as they see fit with U.S. assistance.

Iraq, perhaps, is in many ways the ultimate foreign aid project.

This is easily the most though-provoking book I have read in some time, and I absolutely recommend it to anyone with even a passing interesting in foreign aid or foreign policy. More in depth reviews can be found here.