The White Man's Burden Analysis

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The book, The White Man’s Burden, is a criticism of the Western countries’ arrogant efforts and political economic inefficiencies to improve the future of developing countries. It shows how the West failed and is still failing to put its utopian ideology plans aside in evolving countries. Sometimes irreverent, in other angry, but always farsighted and rigorous, Easterly argues that the West must confront its own history of ineptitude and draw its own conclusions, especially when the question of our ability to move Western institutions to the Third World is one of the more pressing debates that we face. William Easterly was born in West Virginia in September 7, 1957. He is currently a Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-Director …show more content…

The planners are portrayed as the people who announce their intentions but don’t do anything to encourage anyone to carry them out; planners are basically the ones who think they know all the answers. While the searchers are portrayed as the “humble” ones; the ones who work their field correctly. They are the people who accept their responsibilities for their actions, the ones who find answers to individual problems only by trial and error (Easterly, Ch.1). Easterly also focuses on the “big push”. Easterly talks about how the poor are essentially trapped in a “poverty trap” and because of that they cannot rise. That’s why “outsiders” tend to help the poor. An example would be Africa; an African country receives more than 15 percent of its income from foreign countries. That’s how the big countries push poor countries around. Chapter 3 focuses on how the “big push” tends to fail, which leads to creating free markets. Creating free markets won’t work because free markets develop in an unorganized and spontaneous way. They adapt to local conditions and don’t grow as planned. Chapter 4 and 5 focuses on the type of governments poor countries have. Most poor countries fail due to corruption in their governments. That’s where the richer countries tend to help by sending aid. But this flops again because the richer countries send things the poor don’t need. The last chapters focus on the future. Easterly talks about how the countries that are successful became that way because instead of copying the West, they tweaked their own with the positive parts of the

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