Making Aid Obsolete

When I was a child, we were told to eat our vegetables because people in India, China, Africa (pick one) were starving. The question of how my eating vegetables was supposed to help those poor people remained unanswered. What we did presume was that they would be helped by missionaries, and then, with more up-to-date information, by massive inputs of something called foreign aid that well-meaning governments like our own sent to the governments of the needy countries.

A few decades on, all those assumptions have gone topsy-turvy. At about the turn of the millennium, a raft of studies and books emerged to argue that too much of what was forked out as foreign aid was achieving no good at all. In books such as White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly, or The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign...