Planners' Failure, Searchers' Success

The short answer on why dying poor children don't get twelve-cent medicines, while healthly rich children do get Harry Potter, is that twelve-cent medicines are supplied by Planners while Harry Potter is supplied by Searchers.

This is not to say that everything should be turned over to the free market that produced and distributed Harry Potter.  The poorest people in the world have no money to motivate matket Searchers to meet their desperate need. However, the mentality of Searchers in matkets is a guide to a constructive approach to foreign aid.

In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out ; Searchers find that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them ; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprintsl Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it neededl Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

A planner thinks he already knows the answers ; he think of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will slove. A searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

(중략)Searchers have better incentives and better results. When a high willingness to pay for a thing coincides with low costs for that things, Searchers will find a way to get it to the customer.

Searcher could find ways to make a specific task - such as getting medicines to dying children -work if they could concentrate on that task instead of Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure of the task didn't work. We will see some areas where Searchers have alreadly achieved tangible benefits, but they have had little chance to deliver in the area of global poverty because foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The Planners have the rhetorical advantage of promising great things; the end of poverty. The only thing the Planners have against them is that they gave us the second tragedy of the world's poor. Poor people die not only because of the world's indifference to their poverty, but also because if ineffective efforts by those who do care.

< The White Man's Burden ; Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good > p 5~7