The End of Poverty

Starting with the title, "The End Of Poverty," and ending with the author's close ties to an actual movement to do just that, there is a lot to like about this book. I have to admit that I never finished the whole thing, but having read most of it on the recommendation of a pastor at my church, I was inspired by the idea that it is possible to completely eliminate the most horrible kind of poverty in the world. The book strikes a good balance between describing the realities of extreme poverty with some key high-level statistics such as "more than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty" then drilling down into what that means in terms of famine, disease and poor medical services. Then, before you get depressed and check out, the author starts to talk about some success stories he's been involved in as an economic advisor, and then describes a framework for diagnosing the causes of poverty in different locations and taking appropriate "differential" action.

Mr. Sachs is closely associates with the UN's Millennium Development Goals which are a comprehensive set of goals for dealing with poverty by 2015. The first goal is related specifically to extreme poverty:

Goal 1 of the Millennium Development Goals sets out by the year 2015 to:

• Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day.

• Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

 

So, in some ways, the book seems like an extensive sales pitch for the the Millennium Goals, which is fine with me, but the development community is certainly not all in agreement that this is the right path. There is a great contrarian review of this book by William Easterly, the author of another book I loved, "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics".  As he states in the opening of the review:

 

Jeffrey D. Sachs's guided tour to the poorest regions of the Earth is enthralling and maddening at the same time -- enthralling, because his eloquence and compassion make you care about some very desperate people; maddening, because he offers solutions that range all the way from practical to absurd. It's a shame that Sachs's prescriptions are unconvincing because he is resoundingly right about the tragedy of world poverty.

 

All in all, I can't imagine a better debate to be going on than how to keep those 20,000 people alive each day.

 

UPDATE: It seems that Mr. Easterly has expanded his criticism of the aid establishment into a new book - The White Man's Burden. I haven't read this yet, but it is on it's way out of an Amazon warehouse as we speak. The funny thing about this all is that Amazon puts this book together with the Sach's book in one of their "Better Together" recommendations. That may be true of the books, but probably not of the authors.