I recently picked up a copy of William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, subtitled “why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good.” The opening section on Planners vs. Searchers had me hooked—I highly recommend it to anyone interested in economic development.

Easterly is a former World Bank planner (rumor has it writing an earlier book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, got him fired) who has been thoroughly converted to the searcher approach to addressing poverty.

Like C. K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Easterly’s book focuses on how traditional, top-down approaches to ending poverty never seem to accomplish the lofty goals they aspire to, while smaller, bottom-up “searcher” driven efforts frequently create entire new markets and middle-classes to support them.

What do these books, focused as they are on aid to the developing world, have to do with Cleveland? Quite a bit, actually. (Hint: It has to do with Planners vs. Searchers.)

Cleveland has been tagged as the most poverty-ridden big city in America. This is a bit of a canard, since other cities to which Cleveland was compared have incorporated their suburbs, thus raising the average for those “cities” when compared to the strictly limited borders of Cleveland proper. Incorporating just the first ring suburbs of Cleveland into the figures drops us to about 49th; adding out to the suburban communities abutting highways that ring the city and the picture improves even more—at least, for those who live and work in this larger place often referred to as “Greater Cleveland.”

At the same time, though, it highlights just how dire things really are in certain parts of our community. If tossing in a few suburban communities changes the rankings that drastically, what does this say about the state of the urban core? And what can we do about it?

We’ve certainly made and published our share of plans to fix the problem. Big plans, built from the top down. But just as great buildings aren’t built from the top down, neither are the great cities where those buildings are found. Everything has to be built from the bottom up.

Scott Suttell over at Crain’s picked up on this the other day when he discovered a Cleveland-based program profiled in a Sunday New York Times article. While not directly about technology, the structure of Stephen Brobeck’s America Saves program is one that those of us interested in the region’s technology economy need to pay attention to and take to heart. We argue for change in the industries that make up this region’s economy, and craft grand plans for making that change happen quickly and forcefully. What we forget in the process is that the primary barrier to change is social pressure, and that is something that can be changed only from the bottom up, over time, through modest institutional changes. Before we can change our industries, we first need to change minds.

Click here to read the New York Times article about Stephen Brobeck’s work. Then visit America Saves for yourself. Then ask yourself, “How might we apply Brobeck’s approach to changing attitudes about saving money to changing attitudes about the type of work and jobs that can save this region?”