Does He Hear the World's Poor? Don't Bank on It.

All of which leaves the bank in rocky shape. The best and the brightest of its staff have been leaving in a steady, demoralized exodus, and poor nations are now deserting the bank to seek loans from private capital markets or grants from aid donors like China, who are in it for No. 1. Meanwhile, new private foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org and so on) are taking over traditional bank areas such as health and agriculture. Add to that the debacle over Wolfowitz's sweetheart deal, and you have a bank facing the gravest crisis in its six-decades-old history.

Can -- or should -- the bank be saved? Yes, but not without real change. It would be a shame to discard the world's largest repository of development knowledge and experience.

The bank's problems would be simpler -- though still far from simple -- if it were not trying to transform whole countries but simply finding out which tools in its toolkit truly help poor individuals help themselves. We should hold the bank accountable for deregulating the overregulated, feeding the hungry, supplying clean water to the thirsty and treating the sick. The bank has already made real progress in all these areas, and it could make even more if its many talented staffers were freed from their current bureaucratic hell and allowed to do what they do best.

How sad that such obvious principles still aren't embraced. One can only hope that the reformers, whose only political asset is their compassion for the poor, will prove strong enough in this hour of crisis to save the bank -- not for its own sake but for the sake of the world's most vulnerable people. That would be a regime change we could all live with.

william.easterly@nyu.edu

William Easterly, who worked for 16 years as a research economist at the World Bank, is a professor of economics at New York University. He is the author of "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good."