by William Easterly
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Product Description
Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America. Attempted remedies have included providing foreign aid, investing in machines, fostering education, controlling population growth, and making aid loans as well as forgiving those loans on condition of reforms. None of these solutions has delivered as promised. The problem is not the failure of economics, William Easterly argues, but the failure to apply economic principles to practical policy work.
In this book Easterly shows how these solutions all violate the basic principle of economics, that people—private individuals and businesses, government officials, even aid donors—respond to incentives. Easterly first discusses the importance of growth. He then analyzes the development solutions that have failed. Finally, he suggests alternative approaches to the problem. Written in an accessible, at times irreverent, style, Easterly's book combines modern growth theory with anecdotes from his fieldwork for the World Bank.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 And the Wizard explains Oz..., 2008-07-29
Easterly is a brilliant and talented writer, as one would expect from the World Bank. At times, though, the Bank is isolated from the benefits of being subjected to such talent. Individual efforts are certainly reviewed, but at the end of the day, Stiglitz and others have argued that the very points Easterly makes suggests that the Bank is far off the course set by its mandate. We are therefore left with yet another recommended "fine tuning" of WB programming without a serious reflection over whether the WB is the proper mechanism for fiddling with the intricate clockworks that are national economies. I sign off by asking the Americans, Britons, Australians, French, Swiss and others from "developed" countries what it would take to allow an autocratic, bureaucratic and politically un-accountable (and this series of adjectives in no way lessens the tremendous respect I have for nearly every WB staff member I've met) organization tip-toe into THEIR administrative systems. I argue that the problem with economic tinkering in the Pacific is that it is, and looks to remain, the product of bureaucratic meddling on a scale similar to Mao's China, which undermines both the development of governance systems that can curtail corruption (i.e. local acocuntability for performance based on available resources- NOT (!!!!!!) in any way similar to efforts to make local authorities better subsidiaries of the notably corrupt central governments as is currently being pushed in the Pacific and elsewhere) AND legitimate free market systems. This book is a fantastic read, and I highly recommend it be paired with Stiglitz's "Globalization..." and Jeffrey Sach's "End of Poverty..." for a very ponderous but enriching book club series.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 A Partial Answer to the Question of Why the World is the Way it is, 2008-04-18
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William Easterly is an honest answer to part of the question, "why hasn't the world improved like we thought it would?" Easterly conducts a post-mortem conference on western aid programs since the end of World War II, finding that in many cases we should have known better. The incentives created by some nations' economic environment, or the aid programs themselves led national economies into periods of stagnant or negative growth. Easterly's mantra is "people respond to incentives." Ignoring this truth, a central tenet of economics, has led to several irrational choices in the area of development aid, and many failures to achieve our objectives.
While pessimistic at times in his evaluation of what we have done in the West, the truth behind the text is that all these problems are preventable. Overall, a valuable and essential piece of information in understanding the state of the world today in regards to differing economic outcomes and how it has come to be that way.
3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 Elementary at Best, 2008-01-27
I understand that it's a book written to be accessible to people like myself who are not economists and will NEVER be economists, but that does not mean I have to be treated like I am severely unintelligent. The reading level of this book falls far below what any college educated person should be expected to read. I don't think the author of this book is nearly as deserving of the high accolades (not to mention profits) he has been receiving for writing this book. When a book contains the phrase 'I think learning under the right circumstances is a very good thing' you know that the quality of the writing is deficient. It is elementary at best.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Indispensable read for those interested in economic development, 2008-01-17
William Easterly, who worked as an economist for many years at the World Bank, tries to explain why many of the recipes economists devised for economic growth in the Third World didn't work out: neither foreign aid, neither greater expenditure in education, neither population control programs (among others) seemed to work. The reason, says Easterly, is that those recipes ignore a crucial truth in economics: people respond to incentives. None of these programs were devised in making people take advantage of economic growth. Much of the foreign aid was captured by corrupt rent seeking individuals, and very little of the aid trickled down to the poor. Besides, Easterly is very courageous in asserting that ethnic diversity can be detrimental to economic growth. Paradoxically, as I'm writing this (early 2008), emerging countries are going through an economic boom, thanks in great part to high commodity prices, so in some sense this book is a little out of date (it was first published in 2001). However, one wonders what will happen when commodity prices go down (as they inevitably will at some point) There was a high commodity price cycle in the early 70s, but when it panned out, it left the third world poorer and more indebted. In the case of India and China, however, since they have concentrated their production in goods and services with a higher added value, I think a continuing high path growth seems assured, so I'm more optimistic right now than Easterly was when he wrote this book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 A pessimistic view of the poor world's prospects, 2007-12-11
William Easterly is a former employee of the World Bank and has significant experience in development economics, so I was interested to find out what approach he recommended to help the poorest regions of the world increase their standard of living. Though he was very good as explaining what didn't work, solutions were less forthcoming.
Easterly takes us on a tour of various strategies that have been employed in the past and were each touted as the "magic formula" that would jump-start poor countries on the path to wealth: investment in capital, development aid, education, population control, etc. For each of these solutions, he analyses the data and concludes that it was not the correct approach to reducing poverty. So what is?
He doesn't really say. Easterly tells us that bad government, corruption and the twisted incentives that accompany both are what have doomed poor countries. Therefore, if we could simply install good government and weed out corruption, the problem would be solved! While a nice solution in theory, the difficulties in `encouraging' good government are well recorded in international history.
The book interleaves chapters will short snapshots of the lives of the very poor, giving examples of the misery that has befallen them. These help to put a human face on the suffering but unfortunately the snapshots are not linked to the analysis (for example, the snapshot following the chapter on education has nothing to do with how a lack of education harmed this person).
Easterly clearly cares about the poor, would like to help them, and is tired of seeing well-meaning westerners throw billions of dollars into projects that yield no real progress. But he has gotten us no closer to a solution either.
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