Review of Easterly's The White Man's Burden

Abstract

William Easterly has a reputation of being a free enterprise oriented economist. Were this not the case, his 2006 book The White Man's Burden would not have been such a disappointment. In the event, this author misunderstands economic planning; buys into the fallacious notion of the poverty trap (poor nations are too poverty stricken to develop on their own without help from others - how did England manage this?); accepts a positive role for government in development, just as does Easterly's target, Jeffrey Sachs; calls for state investment in early education; extols the virtues of democracy; attacks the idea of private fire companies, among many other compromises with dirigisme. With friends like this, laissez faire capitalism hardly needs enemies.