the Evil Line

William Easterly says foreign aid isn't working:

This is the tragedy in which the West already spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still had not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families.

I read a little bit of his book in the Boulder Bookstore the other day, and it seems quite interesting. But I'm not sure preaching about "accountability" really counts as having a concrete plan for fighting poverty. Then there's this:

Economic development happens, not through aid, but through the homegrown efforts of entrepreneurs and social and political reformers. While the West was agonizing over a few tens of billion dollars in aid, the citizens of India and China raised their own incomes by $715 billion by their own efforts in free markets.

But how do you turn Ethiopia into India?