Aid Critic William Easterly Gets a Blog

An early 20th century cartoon of Kipling's "The White Man's Burden"

I'm sure that my fellow bloggers Alanna (Global Health), Michael (Humanitarian Relief) and Michelle (Genocide) are going to be all over this, but acid-quilled aid critic William Easterly has just started a blog: "Aid Watch."

To give a little background, Easterly is the author of "The White Man's Burden," a critique of aid that laments "planners" who design grandiose interventions with only circumspect attention to local assets, ideas, and initiative and little tolerance for variance. I called the book one of the Top Five Critiques of Development and Humanitarianism. While its often presented as the antithesis of Jeffrey Sachs "End of Poverty," that's too simple an explanation.

Already in his first few posts, Easterly has brought some fire to the field, calling a new program designed to help attendees of the World Economic Forum understand the plight of refugees " “insensitive,” “dehumanizing,” or “disrespectful” (not to mention “ludicrous”)." There are other great humanitarian aid bloggers out there who bring similarly complicated views to the field (including one of my favorites "The Road to the Horizon") but its great to have someone of Easterly's stature blogging about these issues.

So why does it matter for social entrepreneurship? Two big reasons.

First, critiques of aid help development professionals think about new strategies. I think that aid is an important part of the puzzle for development, and that simply saying things like "trade vs. aid" dramatically oversimplifies things. But I do think market-based solutions have a huge amount of promise and that critiques like Easterly's soften the field to recognize the real opportunities of innovators like the Acumen Fund, who make investments in local social entrepreneurs harnessing the power of markets.

Second, in general, I think critique is important. Social change efforts can't exist on good intentions alone, and while organizations are becoming more accountable, it's incredibly important to have our feet held to the fire by external actors, as well. This is the reason that we assign all of our Northwestern students who go abroad to read books like "White Man's Burden" or Ivan Illich's "To Hell with Good Intentions," and its why Michael Edwards' critique of social entrepreneurship is high on my list of top reads for social entrepreneurs.

Being able to wrestle with serious and profound critiques of our enterprise does nothing but improve the quality of our work.