1st half of chapter 1: The White Man's Burden

- 2 tragedies of the world's poor
○ Three dollars for a net--> prevents malaria--> death of thousands of children each year
○ West spent 2.3$ trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades, though still not managed to get malaria medicine to prevent half of the deaths of children
- The book is about "second tragedy"
- "the right plan is to have no plan"

Planner's Failure, Searcher's success
- advocates of traditional approach: planners
- Agents for change in alternative approach: searchers
- Planner think he already knows the answer, thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answer will solve
- Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answer from the beginning , he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors. A searcher hopes to find the answer to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.
- Lack of local information

Big Problems and big plans
- Our dream Is a world free of poverty- president james wolfensohn of the world bank
- Different ideas of how to get rid of poverty in past which did not work--> learn from mistake

The backward question that cripples foreign aid
- What can foreign aid do for poor people?

Getting bed nets to the poor
- Bed nets to sure poverty? Is that of any help?
- If that is of good use..then why didn’t the planners do it yet? Problem: How to get it to the poor…
- If they get the nets, use it for different stuff: fishing etc

Philosophy of social Change:
- The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering

Feedback and accountability
- Two key elements that make searchers work and whose absence is fatal to plans are feedback and accountability
- At a higher level accountability is necessary to motivate is necessary to motivate a whole organizations of government to use searchers. In contrast, planners flourish where there is little accountability.