Bauer held that foreign aid cannot promote growth and persists mainly from Western guilt

Evidence

Advocacy of international aid, or what Bauer preferred to call “government to government transfer,” is one of the grave errors for which development economists stand accused. Bauer argues that such aid does not and cannot promote economic growth in the Third World; where development has occurred, foreign assistance played no meaningful role in the process. Given the inefficacy of such transfers, why do arguments for foreign aid persist? Bauer suggested that “Western guilt” was the principal impetus behind such flows (Bauer 1977). In fact, if the Third World transformed itself into a lobbying group for ever greater amounts of assistance, the rich countries are primarily to blame since, in Bauer’s view, the demand for foreign aid was created by the very act of giving it, with the original sin dating back to U.S. president Harry Truman’s misguided Point Four Program of 1949 (Bauer 1984). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1769

Categorization

• XREF: Doctrine of effect: the demand for aid created by the act of giving — echoes supply-created-demand logic familiar from other critiques of state programs; parallels the self-perpetuating information-overload/-commercial-interest dynamic noted elsewhere. — connects to: Bauer claimed Western contact, not aid, drove Third World material progress — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1770; Bauer championed private foreign investment and bourgeois virtues against development orthodoxy — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1321; Bauer argued foreign aid encouraged state ownership and bureaucratic growth in developing countries — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1319 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: the ‘original sin’ framing of Truman’s Point Four Program as the founding moment of aid-dependency discourse — a genealogy piece on how a single 1949 policy was retroactively cast as the origin of a moral hazard.

Broader Connections

• Bauer argued foreign aid encouraged state ownership and bureaucratic growth in developing countries #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1319
• Bauer claimed Western contact, not aid, drove Third World material progress #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1770
• Foreign aid has made recipient countries poorer rather than stable. #corroborates (0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 31
• Bauer championed private foreign investment and bourgeois virtues against development orthodoxy #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1321
• MPS revisionism shaped Bauer’s denial that Western colonialism caused Third World poverty. #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1308