William Easterly’s most recent book, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), criticizes Western approaches to global poverty. In “The Ideology of Development” (Foreign Policy, July/August 2007), Easterly warns of the dangers of “Developmentalism.”
Easterly’s chief economic adversaries, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier, take a more aid-oriented approach. Sachs's Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York: Penguin Press, 2008) and Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) offer policy solutions for the world’s most pressing problems.
For a look at one of the earliest and most prescient (and now forgotten) economists to advocate the potential of free markets as a tool for development, read S. Herbert Frankel’s Some Conceptual Aspects of International Economic Development of Underdeveloped Territories (Princeton: Princeton University, 1952). For a more well-known early critique of development, see P.T. Bauer’s Dissent on Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
