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How long does it take to read The White Man's Burden?

William Russell Easterly

The White Man's Burden by William Russell Easterly takes about 8 hours to read at 250 words a minute.

About 8 hours

A week or two of reading

First published 2006. 436 pages, about 119,900 words.

16 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 13 hours 19 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 8 hours
Fast, 400 words a minute 5 hours

The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

From one of the world's best-known development economists—an excoriating attack on the tragic hubris of the West's efforts to improve the lot of the so-called developing worldIn his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man's Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch—a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West's economic policies for the world's poor. Sometimes angry, sometimes irreverent, but always clear-eyed and rigorous, Easterly argues that we in the West need to face our own history of ineptitude and draw the proper conclusions, especially at a time when the question of our ability to transplant Western institutions has become one of the most pressing issues we face.

Subjects: Business, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Economic assistance, Poverty

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