The White Man's Burden | William Easterly | Talks at Google

I want to thank you all for coming to our Authors at Google series. We have a really remarkable gentleman here today who's going to speak. The fact that there are so many people here today, I know, is a testament to. To, you know, to his reputation and not simply to the fact that there are many of his books available here for free. I actually have to say that I asked to be able to introduce Bill Easterly today. It's very rare that you have the opportunity to introduce an author whose work you've actually read before and read in a professional context and used in your work and in your teaching, in my case. But Bill's first book, the Elusive Quest for Growth, was a truly remarkable book because it really challenged the assumptions that are the foundation or lay the foundation for international aid and really fundamentally, I believe, changed the debate over what the role of the west and the rich countries should play in promoting economic, really and social and political development in the developing world and how that aid could be used and what really the lessons and experience, the frankly unfortunate lessons and experience of the past had been. His new book is out. It is White Man's Burden. It is a very well received book, and I'm delighted that Bill is here today to speak about it. He is someone who comes, as I said, with a tremendous reputation, almost two decades of work at the World bank, and he's currently a professor at NYU where his work continues to focus on issues of international economic development and growth. I think the way we're going to do this is Bill's going to speak for half an hour and then take questions. And with that, I'll introduce Bill Easterly.

So we're going to focus on a very narrow topic today. Can the West Save the Rest? And a lot of what I'm doing is really just, you know, relentless, shameless promotion of a new book that you will have heard of already. And that book is this one. I thought I actually would start promoting the book of my intellectual opponent, Jeffrey Sachs, who has the exact opposite point of view of mine. But I thought that would be a good place to start because debates make things more fun. So this other book actually is more appealing than what I have to offer because he offers a great promise that our breathtaking opportunity is to spread the benefits of technology to all parts of the world. And I can't really compete with that. I'll just admit that at the beginning. And, you know, not only that, but he's. He's attracted some, a lot of intellectual support. He's endorsed by the world's Leading development economist, which of course, as you know, is Bono. And you know, the. And Bono in his article in Econometrica said, well, actually it was in the introduction to Jeff's book, said these four, four very illustrative words. It's up to us. There was something that really bothered me about the, the idea that it's up to us. And that's what sort of inspired the satirical title the White Man's Burden of this book, which is what I'm actually going to be talking about today. And you know, this book, it was very nice of the speaker to say. It's been well received. It has gotten rave reviews from all members of my immediate family. The book talks about what I think are two tragedies that we have to confront today that face the world's poor. And the first tragedy is the one that Jeff Sachs book is about and which I think he does a great job raising, does a great job calling the attention of everyone around the world who cares about the world's poor. He points out that 30,000 children die every day from extreme poverty. They die because they're literally too poor to stay alive. And one example of that is the 1.8 million deaths a year of children from diarrheal diseases, which causes dehydration. And then death, which could have been death, could have been prevented by something so simple and basic as an oral rehydration therapy kit that costs exactly 10 cents. So for lack of 10 cents, a child dies and 1.8 million of those children die every year. That really is a tragedy. So if only the west could give more money to fund those child rehydration packets, then a lot of unnecessary deaths could be prevented. But there is a second tragedy, which is that the west already gave $2.3 trillion through official aid agencies over the past five decades. And after 2.3 trillion, in five decades, there were still 2 million, nearly 2 million child deaths from things that could have been prevented with something so basic as 10 cent doses that somehow the 10 cent doses of oral rehydration were not reaching, were not reaching babies suffering from diarrhea despite, despite all the goodwill and the good intentions. And this really, I think is one of the scandals of our generation that so much money is spent, has been spent already. So much effort is exerted towards solving the problems of the world's poor, and yet at the end of the day, there's so little evidence that the money actually reaches the poor. So, you know, the, the favorite answer to the first tragedy has been around for A long time. It's to just increase the amount of money spent on foreign aid. And here, actually, in the reading that I did as research for this book, economists, like other social scientists, are really proud when they discover a new empirical law. And I think I discovered a new empirical law about foreign aid. Discussion Foreign aid, the political economy of foreign aid, which is whenever anyone starts paying attention to the problems of the world's poor, the answer is always the same, that you should double foreign aid. And this, this is, you know, it's like, you know, one of those constants that physicists find, you know, like the speed of light or something. You know, I think I've discovered a new constant that's exactly double. It's not that you want to increase aid by 90% or 113%. It's always exactly double whatever the existing amount is. So if you go back to 1960, an advisor to John F. Kennedy named Walt Rostow called for doubling foreign aid back then, World Bank President McNamara again called for doubling in 1973, World bank called for doubling with the end of the Cold War in 1990, Jeff Sachs, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown called for doubling foreign aid in 2005. And in fact, the G8 summit in July 2005 did agree to double foreign aid, both double foreign aid to Africa and double foreign aid to all poor countries. And even my president, our President George W. Bush, is increasing U.S. aid. He announced in 2002 an increase in U.S. foreign aid of 50%, which I admit at first bothered me that it didn't fit the iron law of doubling that I had discovered. Then I did a little more checking with the White House staff, and they explained to me that he thought 50% was double. So. But you know, sadly, what this means is when there's so much attention focused on how much is spent, then what kind of incentives does that create for everyone who operates in these aid agencies? It creates incentives for just spending more money. It doesn't seem to create much incentive for actually getting results with that money, for making sure that that money reaches the poor. And so the second tragedy continues unabated. And so let's look a little more at the second tragedy. Why do things go wrong and why do I think plans, the Jeff Sachs book and his work for the United nations is really in line with kind of what has been the traditional mainstream approach to foreign aid, which is kind of come up with a big plan to solve all of the problems of the world's poor and then try to implement it. So this plan, it's not that complicated. It's just the plan proposes 449 separate interventions to meet 54 Millennium Development Goal indicators. The Millennium Development Goals are these targets that the United nations has announced for the year 2015 to be reached by the year 2015 that all the aid agencies have have endorsed. And this is set out very concisely and neatly in a 451 page main report with 3300 pages of technical annexes. How would you implement it? Well, Jeff Sachs recommends that the UN Secretary General personally run the plan coordinating the actions of thousands of officials in six different UN agencies, the UN country teams, the World bank, the imf, possibly Bono, all consistent with another set of plans which, you know, each aid agency is producing their own plan. The World bank and the IMF have also have plans to reduce world poverty that they call Poverty Reduction Strategy papers which are laid out in a 1,246 page poverty reduction strategy paper sourcebook. What's wrong with this picture? Well, what's wrong is you have all the aid donors and recipients collectively responsible for meeting 54 worldwide goals, which also the attainment of these goals also depends on lots of other things besides what the aid agencies do. So you know, if I sort of analyze this as a real hard hearted economist, well, hard headed, soft hearted but hard headed economist, you know, the conclusion that you reach when you analyze the kind of incentives that are created by the system, you reach this very striking conclusion. And I, since I usually shy away from controversy, I put it in very fine print. This system as it exists now is that nobody is individually responsible for any one result. Nobody is individually responsible for any one result. Everybody is collectively responsible for multiple goals, which also depends on lots of other things. So if a result is not achieved, you have three possible excuses which all work very well. You can say it wasn't my fault, it was the fault of the other eight agencies. Or second, you can say, well that wasn't the goal that I was working towards, it was actually one of the other goals. Or you can say, you know, the goal wasn't reached because of factors beyond my control, because the goals are affected by factors beyond our control. So that's the aid plans give the appearance of action that, you know, there's all this publicity and hoopla which makes everyone in the rich countries feel good that something is being done. But they actually substitute for real action which perpetuates the second tragedy of the world's poor, that foreign aid money is spent but it doesn't reach them. So you know, since Bono and Sachs and all have such a media friendly campaign. I decided to come up with my own acronym to suggest what I think is wrong with their approach to foreign aid and what has really always been wrong with the official aid agencies approach to foreign aid. And so I came up with this acronym, chow, which reminds me of sort of afternoons spent in piazzas in Italy sipping espresso or you know, saying goodbye to a lovely Italian woman and kissing her on the cheek and saying ciao. You know, there's lots of pleasant associations. Actually I took some work to get to this. I initially only came up with the first three letters for my acronym and I realized that might create some confusion, so I came up with an O word too. So the C stands for customer feedback. The second tragedy is happening because there's no customer feedback built into the aid plans. The aid plans fail also for lack of the I, the incentives. There's no incentives for people to deliver results. And the reason is because there's no accountability. There's no accountability for results, there's no outcry when results are not achieved. And so the result is the lack of the O, the lack of good outcomes. And so somehow the system has to be radically changed so that there is some kind of individual accountability which would create incentives which would then motivate people to get customer feedback on what is reaching the poor and what is not reaching the poor, which would then lead to better outcomes. So the alternative to planners is what the book calls searchers, you know, and normally I have a really hard time with audiences trying to explain the concept of searching, you know, and so I was really, really super excited to receive the invitation to talk to you because I think you understand what searching means. Searching means that you do an open ended search for what works, you get feedback on what works, you have the incentives to make it work, and you're held accountable for whether it works or not. And we have examples of that, of systems that do work well. So we have the private markets that work well, where firms get feedback from their customers, which they have to listen to if they don't want to go out of business. They have the incentives to get the goods to the customers and they're held accountable for whether the customers are satisfied. The customers are dissatisfied, they can take their business elsewhere. Politicians in rich countries are subject to voter feedback and so they have more incentive to deliver public services. It doesn't always work perfectly. We know lots of ways that it breaks down, but it does work well enough so that public services by and large do get delivered. And by and large, the government does not do anything too awful to you because you have the ability to devote anyone who does anything too awful to you as a citizen out of office. And then there are social entrepreneurs that are also trying to just look for opportunities to solve specific fixable things. And they have good chow, they have good customer feedback, incentives, accountability. They get better outcomes. Now what I don't mean to say by giving these examples is that we can all just go home and just let nature take its course and have the problems of the world's poor be solved by free markets and, or the evolution of democracy. Because we know lots of examples of free markets coexisting with poverty. Free markets do not automatically solve poverty. And the needs of the poor do not get met through free markets because they don't have the money with which to make their needs known to the people who would have the incentive to supply them. But what I do think the market is good for is as a metaphor and a model for how aid should work. The way it should work is that aid agencies and philanthropic foundations and all the people who want to help the world's poor should think in terms of chow. Think like a market firm of satisfying the customers, having the, giving your employees the incentives to satisfy the customers, being held accountable for whether you satisfy the customers. And that's the only way you get good outcomes. So the tragedy is, the second tragedy is that the rich are getting their needs met by, by political, economic and social searchers who do have good chow. But on the other side of the aid wall, the poor are stuck largely with official aid, which is mired in this swamp of top down planning, grandiose, complex plans that are formulated in Washington and New York, that make a big splash when they come out, but don't actually hold anyone accountable for doing anything. And so the second tragedy continues. Now you do have to answer the question, why has this happened? Why have planners taken over foreign aid? So, you know, I think there is a political explanation, which is that what I said at the beginning, you know, Jeff Sachs has a great built in rhetorical advantage in that he's promising very wonderful things happening in a fairly easy way. So, you know, if you as a politician are not going to be held accountable for a promise that you make, you might as well make as big a promise as possible, you know, because you're not going to be held accountable for it anyway. So don't just promise to save, you know, 100 people in Ghana, you should promise to end world poverty because no one, you get credit for the promise, but you, you don't get held accountable for whether you did anything to keep the promise. And by contrast, searchers have a much harder task convincing people and coming up with media friendly campaigns because they don't offer a quick, easy solution to the end of poverty. And the reason they don't offer it is because there is no quick, easy solution that would achieve the end of poverty. And they do. And the big thing with searchers is that they do accept accountability and they insist on accountability. And accountability is just a very unpopular notion. Nobody likes to be held accountable. So if someone has the choice of not being held accountable and being held accountable, they always choose not to be held accountable. Now one other reason that planners are so popular is that these big UN Millennium Development Goal plan campaigns have really persuasive spokespeople like Angelina Jolie. So that's, you know, that's part of the success of the big Millennium Development Goals campaign is thanks to intellectuals like Angelina. By the way, I found her picture on Google dot images. So thank you, thank you for that. You know, I was trying to kind of try to think of my own, try to recruit my own female sex symbol that would kind of embody the cause of accountability, you know, that would, you know, would really go toe to toe with Angelina to embody the fierce idea of accountability. So the one I came up with was Judge Judy. So I'm open to your feedback on this now. You know, from the glories of Google images to the sad realities of the data, this is the kind of failure that makes us, you know, want to change things. The only thing that planners have against them is that 42 years of aid plans have not worked to enable poor countries to get out of poverty. The way this graph works is it groups countries into four groups. The group on the left is the quarter of countries with the highest aid, and that's measured by the red line. And their per capita economic growth is measured by the blue line. So the countries with the highest aid have actually had the worst growth and the countries with the lowest aid, who are getting virtually no aid, have the highest growth. Now there's, in the economics literature, there's, you know, much more sophisticated ways of looking at this picture and trying to control for possible causality going in the other direction and for other factors that might have affected growth. And there are all kinds of complications in interpreting how, what these data mean. But a lot of effort has gone into analyzing this data. And now the consensus of the empirical literature is pretty much we have an answer that on average, we find no evidence that aid creates growth, taking into account every other possible factor and controlling for any possible reverse causation from growth to the amount of aid that you give. The answer of the empirical literature and economics is that there's no evidence for any positive effect of aid on growth. It's not. It's not working to lift poor people out of poverty. And another kind of aid program that the IMF and the World bank have followed, especially in Africa, has been called structural adjustment, which is an attempt to change things at the top by putting conditions on aid loans and trying to force governments to change their behavior in ways that they think will create more economic growth and development. Well, that has also unfortunately failed the African countries that have gotten the most structural adjustment loans over two decades. Countries like Ivory coast, which the French call it Ivory coast and the English call it Cote d', ivoire, have gotten 26 structural adjustment loans, so more than one a year over the last two decades. And, you know, they had one of the worst depressions in economic history over that same period and are now mired in civil war. That is the kind of result that has been associated with structural adjustment. And again, there's a, you know, sort of more sophisticated economics literature that tries to, you know, analyze the data and do all the same kind of controls and addressing reverse causality. That is done with aid literature. And again, there's the optimists say that at best, there's no evidence at best, the effect of structural adjustment on growth is zero. And there's at worst, there's some very credible studies that conclude the structural adjustment actually had a negative effect on growth. So they attempt to plan to change from the structural adjustment is just another kind of big plan where you try to design a plan in Washington that will change a country from the top down that has really failed to achieve growth. But I actually don't need to tell you as an independent researcher that aid is failing because actually, the aid agencies themselves talk about how aid is failing. The un, which was the. The UN is the father of the or the mother of the. Of the UN Campaign to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals that was started in the year 2000 and in September 2005, just last year, a few months ago, they issued a report on how well the Millennium Development Goals plan is working. And here's some representative quotes from that report. The report was very pessimistic. They. They said the plan is not working. Millions more fell into deep poverty. The decline in hunger is slowing. Immunization is lagging there's no change in maternal mortality, forests are disappearing, et cetera. So you wonder, why is the UN telling us about failure of their own plan, and how are they going to respond to the failure of their own plan? Well, there's kind of three possible responses that I thought of, and then I will. I'll tell you after I tell you the three possible responses which were the ones that were actually followed. One possible response is, you could hold somebody accountable for the failure of the plan and change the whole approach to solving the problems of the world's poor in a way that gets results and create incentives to get results. That's one possible response. Another response is, you could ask donors for more money to follow the same plan that just failed all over again. That's a possible response. And then the third response is the most obvious one. You could just have Jeffrey Sachs do an MTV video with Angelina Jolie. And so for those of you who don't know what actually happened, A never happened, A has never happened in the history of foreign aid, and B and C did actually happen. The reason the UN was talking about failure and the reason Angelina and Jeff Sachs made an MTV video was to ask for the traditional answer to solve the problems of the world's poor, to ask for more aid money, despite the fact that the current aid efforts through official aid agencies, through official plans are failing. Now, what would a searcher look like? Well, this is an area where, because there's not been enough searching done so far, we really don't, you know, we really don't have as much of a track record to draw on. This is, planning has so dominated the approach to aid and the approach to solving the problems of the world's poor that, you know, we just don't have that much evidence on what works in searching because not much searching has been done. But we do have examples of lots of successful searchers on the ground. And oftentimes these are homegrown examples, which is really encouraging. So several of these are given in the book. I try to refrain from making real overtly promotional comments, especially since all of you are getting the book for free. It doesn't really do me any good to, you know, try to promote the book, although, you know, just having one copy for yourself may not be enough. There's also, you know, there's also your friends and neighbors to think about. Christmas will be coming up soon, you know, and, you know, it's not. I won't even mention that the royalties are just paying for medicines for my sick mother, But here's an example of a successful searcher, which is a person that I met personally, and I visited this project personally three times. A Ghanaian man named Patrick Ahua grew up in poverty in Ghana, son of poor parents. His mother was a market trader who was, you know, not rich. Ghana had a brutal military regime while he was growing up. But he managed to escape. Some benefactor gave him the opportunity for escape to give him a plane ticket to go to the US and he got a scholarship at Swarthmore. And then he got rich at another software company whose name I won't mention here. He became a millionaire by getting in on the ground floor of this software company. And he decided to use his own money to start a high quality private university back in Ghana. Because the state of university education in Ghana is really awful, a lot of it financed by foreign aid. But there is just, you know, ramshackle. The ramshackle University of Ghana at Lagon, you know, is crowded with, you know, 200 students into each classroom. They don't have any proper equipment. You know, there's one computer that has to serve, you know, 200 students. The computer does theoretically have a connection to the World Wide Web. But waiting for a given web page to download over the connection that they have at the University of Ghana is kind of, you know, the same kind of visceral experience as watching paint dry. It's extremely slow, slow hook up. But Patrick started at something much better. He. He got very good computer facilities and recruited really good students at this new university that he started called Ashesi University. Ashesi means hope in local Fanti dialect. And 50% of his students are on scholarships paid for by the philanthropic donors that have backed Ashesi University and by Patrick's own money. The curriculum is one of business computers and critical thinking. And one of his proudest moments, he says, came when he got an email from one of his students saying, Mr. Ahua, I am thinking now, the only sad part of this story is that Patrick Ahua was turned down by the official aid donors. When he went to the official aid donors saying, you know, here I have a successful project that's working to benefit a lot of Ghanaians that's going to create the next generation of Ghanaian leaders. You know, do you want to help me expand the scale of the operation? He was turned down. He was turned away by actually not only official aid donors, but traditional foundations. So, you know, what really pains me about as someone who works a lot with really fantastic colleagues from Africa at NYU and colleagues that I meet when I travel to Africa is that it seems like the campaign to sort of Save Africa or Save the Poor of Africa is this sort of European American driven campaign that seems to have room for everyone except the Africans. The there's no room for this sort of homegrown effort that would get started on its own and attract financing. So a searcher model would involve finding. Having aid agencies not do a big plan, but just search for people who are doing good things on the ground and back the scale and find more and more examples of things that work on the ground. Like Patrick's Ashesi University. So I'm starting to wrap up now. The basic policy recommendation of this book is something that it took me a lot of hard work and intellectual research to come to. The idea just kind of struck me late one night when I was. Had already had a couple of beers and. And then I got this great brainstorm that, hey, this would be a great principle to, you know, teach to the world. That had never previously occurred to anybody. And that is when something doesn't work, you should discontinue it. Maybe I was talking too fast. Let me go over that more. Let me go over that more slowly. For those of you who are having trouble following the complexity and richness of this idea. When. When something doesn't work, discontinue it. When something does work, do more of it. That, amazingly, is what has been absent in foreign aid. So on the list of things that don't work, we have a fairly long list of things that we can discard already. And by the way, one of those things I'm not going to discard is the business of foreign aid and philanthropy itself. I think that there are ways to make it work. So I'm not going to give up and say discard foreign aid and philanthropy altogether to help the world's poor. But there are models that can be discarded because they clearly have been tried exhaustively and they haven't worked. So discard the whole model of structural adjustment lending where you decide in Washington what a poor country should do and impose that plan from the top down. That has not worked. So discard that. Just say no to the Millennium Development Goals. You know, they were great for political symbolism and theater and for public relations, but they didn't actually hold anyone responsible for doing anything constructive. Get rid of the poverty reduction strategy papers. No one has ever ended poverty with a poverty reduction strategy paper for long run development. Actually, most of the hope is. Although I think aid can be constructive, I think most of the hope is not from aid per se, not from aid by itself. Most of the hope is from homegrown private entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, reformist politicians that have good chow, good customer feedback, good incentives, good accountability directed towards good outcomes. While aid plays just a supporting role solving fixable problems, the fixable problems that are fixable by outsiders. And once you are willing to think that way, then aid agencies and philanthropists can be set free from trying to achieve grandiose goals which don't create a constructive any mechanism for constructive progress. They can concentrate on taking the piecemeal steps that will improve the lot of poor people rather than trying to develop and transform whole societies. And this doesn't mean always small steps. When you find a piecemeal step that works, then you can keep scaling it up and scaling it up until it's reaching more and more poor people. And you keep testing it to make sure that it works. How do you do that? Well, you have independent evaluation. That's the piece that has been sadly missing for, for 50 years in foreign aid, both for private philanthropy, for non governmental organizations and for official aid agencies, that there has been no independent evaluation of whether the aid dollars actually reach the poor. It has to be independent. Obviously there is some evaluation that goes on within agencies which is self evaluation. But you know, self evaluation is the kind of like, it's sort of like the sort of self accounting that Enron did. You know, it's just, it's not, it's not really a good, a good model for making sure that the company is doing what it's supposed to. You know, it's. And yet somehow we put up with self evaluation and aid with money that is supposed to reach the world's most desperate people instead of demanding independent evaluation to see whether the money really is reaching the point. If we did have independent evaluation, then I think aid agencies would quickly jettison their grandiose symbolic gestures like Millennium Development Goals and they would start specializing on fixable, monitorable tasks on which progress can be made. For example, finally, have someone somewhere responsible have someone somewhere responsible for delivering 10 cent oral rehydration therapy doses to infants. Once you had someone responsible, then more of those doses would start get delivered and we would have fewer infant deaths from diarrheal diseases. And in that same way we can make progress on a lot of problems. So I'll close with an inspirational quote from one of my political heroes, Robert F. Kennedy on searchers on how although the grandiose planners can only be done by the elitists in New York and Washington, all of us can be searchers. All of us can play A role in changing the system of foreign aid. And Robert F. Kennedy talked about what an individual can do to facilitate change. He said, each of us can work to change a small portion of, of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of resistance. Let's join forces and sweep down the aid wall. Let's change foreign aid. Thank you. So we now have time for some questions from the audience. Yes, please. If the UN plans don't work, tell us some things that do work. I was told to repeat the question for the audience as a whole, but that was such a hard question. I don't know if I want to repeat it. The question was if the UN plans don't work, tell us some things that do work. So, you know, there actually are, you know, what frustrates people when they have this discussion is they want to know the sort of one big answer that will enable the poor to escape poverty. And I'll tell you right away. We, you know, economists, political scientists, aid policymakers, everyone has been working on that problem for 60 years. And there is no magic bullet. There is no big program, big clear intervention that will be the big thing that enables for sure poor people to be launched out of poverty. There are only lots of small things that work to improve the well being of poor people. And the accumulation of all those small things will be like RFKs, tiny ripples intersecting into one great current that can change, change the well being of the poor. So we know plenty of things that work. Like, you know, I gave the example of oral rehydration therapy, which actually has, has worked on a limited scale. The tragedy is that, you know, the things that work are not expanded to a large enough scale to cover all the people that, that could be covered to prevent those 2 million deaths. We know things like the Progresa program in Mexico, which was a government program to give cash grants to mothers in return for them keeping their children in school and taking their children for regular health checkups to check that they were vaccinated for everything and that they were getting proper nutrition. You know, there were nutritionists that measured the, the children and make sure they were developing normally. And this program was subject to an independent evaluation and the independent evaluators found that it did work to improve School attendance, the amount of children in school, improve test scores because the children could concentrate more in school, because they were better fed and were healthier and they were losing less time to illness. And it improved health and nutrition indicators for the children. So this was something that could work, that could work. That did work. It was tried and it did work. And then it was expanded. It's now a nationwide program in Mexico. It's been renamed Opportunidades and it's being expanded to other Latin American countries. There are, you know, lots of examples of programs like that that do work in small ways. There are nutrition programs, there are clean water programs, there are programs to simplify government regulations to make it easier to start a new business and create more jobs for poor people, which is also an important dimension of the puzzle that we don't want to forget. Most escape from poverty comes through the efforts of private business. So anything you can do to make it easier for business to operate and create new jobs also has works to help improve the well being of the poor. And so if we had more accountability of aids, then aid would concentrate on those things that we already know work and they would find more things, more small things like that, that work. So let me take one other question over here. Yes. So the question is, do I advocate reforming the UN and the World bank or creating new institutions and starting over? Well, I have kind of a different answer for each institution because the institutions have very different performances. I think the, the World bank and the imf, they could be reformed. And any existing national aid agencies like USAID could be reformed to operate much better following these kind of principles. And they actually do have really high quality professional staff that could find a lot of these good solutions and implement a lot of the good solutions that they've already found if they had better incentives. The incentives of World bank staff now are just to push the money out the door rather than to get results they're never held accountable for whether the program, the loan that they made actually got the results that were intended. But if the incentives were changed by our demanding, you know, political accountability for results of these institutions, then I think they could become much more effective. The UN I'm a little more, maybe a lot more pessimistic about. I think the UN is, is, you know, everything I read and see from the UN just is. Obviously, you know, no one has. I think there are some UN documents that I'm the first person to read because if anyone else had read them, they would have been so appalled that it would have become a Huge scandal in the media by now because there are, you know, reams of UN documents that are produced that you read them and you know, you say, you know, was this document generated by a random number generator that was picking out random phrases and stringing them together. It's just, there's nothing there. There's no there there. And I think the UN has become like this symbolic body that the rich country politicians delegate any problem that they don't want to deal with themselves, they delegate it to the UN and the UN has no ability as a bureaucracy to solve any of those problems. And so it's just become kind of a dumping ground for unsolvable problems. And then it's staffed by, in a very patronage oriented way with, you know, but for people are appointed and promoted for very political reasons, not on the basis of merit. So I'm very pessimistic about the un. It's really a bad organization at this point. And that's, you know, that kind of position is associated with kind of like extreme right wing critics, which I don't think of myself as belonging at all to that camp. I just appalled when I just watched the UN in action. You know, it's just such a sorry excuse for doing anything constructive. Yep. So, you know, I agree with a lot of things you said, but what are the concrete things that, you know, a person like myself could do today or tomorrow? Well, you know, if you're, if you're just, you know, politically active person, you can, you know, join the, all those people that have been campaigning for sort of debt relief and more aid money and you know, fair, more fair globalization and all those, all those causes, you know, some of that energy could be redirected towards, towards making sure that the, the effort that is out there to help the world's poor is actually held accountable for helping them. So political activism to change the political equilibrium I think is part of the answer that the aid agencies are not going to change themselves. They're only going to be changed if there's a big enough political lobby, you know, with campaigning by all of us to convince the politicians in the rich countries that they, that we really don't want to. We're not content anymore with, with our aid dollars being, you know, disappearing into some bureaucratic swamp. We really want to see aid dollars reach the poor. We want the people delivering the dollars to be held accountable for whether 10 cent oral rehydration doses get to sick babies. Then, you know, there's many new initiatives that could be started up. I was talking with some Other Googlers this morning about creative ideas to. To make progress. You know, forming sort of an army of aid watchers could also improve performance. You know, just find some way to create a network. And I think this is, you know, fits in well with the mindset that has made Google so successful. You just find a decentralized network or a decentralized army of people watching what's happening on the ground. People. People monitoring what's happening on the ground, listening and getting feedback from the poor people themselves about whether they are getting what they're supposed to get from the aid agencies that I think would also improve incentives and do a lot of good. So the next time you travel to a developing country, you know, read ahead of time what aid projects are happening in that country. Pick one aid project and arrange a visit to that aid project. Then come home and write the writes, you know, an article for the San Francisco Chronicle about, you know, how this aid project either is working or not working. You know, and if enough people are around the world, including definitely including people in the poor countries themselves, then, you know, we will gradually build up this current that will sweep down the aid wall. Yes. What structural problems that really copyright. No trust in government. How does small operation. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I totally agree with you a lot of. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. Thank you for, thank you for holding me accountable. The question was, where can I buy more Christmas gifts from my friends and relatives? From penguin.org? the question was, isn't a lot of poverty due to sort of bad institutions, bad government, lack of trust in government, lack of the institutions that would make markets work? Yes, definitely. And so, you know, that has. That's definitely true. But it doesn't necessarily follow that the most effective way to effect change is to try to change those institutions from the outside. That's sort of the problem that AID has gotten stuck on, is it has official aid has kind of gotten stuck on, you know, trying to force change from the top down, basically to change governments from the top down to have better policies, to be less corrupt, to be more democratic, to, you know, you know, just behave in ways that would make the escape from poverty through markets easier. And aid has just been, you know, this is an issue I studied a lot in my research and others have studied. And aid and structural adjustment lending has just been extremely unsuccessful at changing governments and institutions from the top down. You know, all you see across the decades is you keep seeing the aid officials keep banging their head against the wall and adopting increasingly coercive measures to try to change poor country governments. You know, that, you know, at first there was just sort of kind of aid project lending. Then there was structural adjustment lending, which carried lots of conditions. And then when that didn't work, then there was more structural adjustment lending, which carried an even longer list of conditions. And then finally, you know, the US Government got so frustrated that they just started sending in the army. You know, let's just, you know, take over the country and try to institute the right institutions and governments. And I don't want to refer to any current political events, but I don't think the sending in the army approach is working all that well either. That's, you know, that's not. The evidence suggests that that's not the way that outsiders can help by trying to force change from the top down. I think they can help much more by trying to create opportunities and more power and voice for individuals in the society who then can, you know, become the next generation of homegrown political reformers who will affect change in the long run in that country. And in the meantime, before homegrown development reaches the poor, outside aid can also help solve a lot of specific problems of the poor that are not being met by their own dysfunctional governments. But I don't think that aid can work to kind of fix a whole system in a poor country. It just. It cannot be done by outsiders, I don't think. Do we have time for one more question? Okay, I'll let you select the questioner who has the easiest question. Okay. They seem to insist on accountability, so I was wondering what you thought about that foundation because they're so prominent and whether they're a planner or a searcher. Yeah. I think the Gates foundation is a step forward because instead of trying to do something grandiose like fix societies from the top down or announce grandiose goals like ending world poverty or cutting world hunger in half, they focused on things that were more fixable by outsiders. You know, exactly what I think many more aid agencies should do. You know, one of the things they focused on was malaria. I don't want to say that any of these things are easy to fix. By the way, you know, that's. Wow. What is this? Oh, I thought that was directed at me when I said love. That was. Okay. It's a screensaver. Okay, great. No, thank you. Thank you, thank you. The last one said shame. So shame on all of us for not doing a better job over the last generation. But, yes, I think the Gates foundation is focusing more on a specific problem, like trying to alleviate the suffering from malaria, trying to find incentives to create a malaria vaccine. They've done some constructive things there. They're working on how to get malaria medicines out more cost effectively to malaria victims, how to get bed nets out to prevent malaria. And, you know, so that, that's a promising step forward. So there are, there are, you know, things that are working better out there. It's actually a lot of field level staff stuff out there that is working. I don't, I don't mean to say that there is nothing working. I'm just saying on average it's not working. But there is stuff out there that does work. The tragedy comes because the successful things are never sort of picked out from the things that don't work. There hasn't been the discrimination so that the things that do work get scaled up and the things that don't work get closed down and get money taken away from them. So that's what we need to change. So thanks very much for your attendance. It's great to have a great audience.