Jeffrey Sachs is an economist who writes far better than any other dismal scientist I've ever read. Lately he's been traveling Africa with Bono (yes, the U2 singer) to drum up aid & debt relief.
"The End of Poverty" tells how he's been helping other areas of the world for the last 20 years-- Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, and even China. He says that economists tend to favor just two or three approaches to solving problems that can actually be caused by eight or nine different factors. Instead of assuming that one symptom is always caused by the same problem, economists need to adopt a more "clinical" approach that depends on their individual knowledge of a country, its culture, and especially its transportation geography. Needless to say Sachs does not like the IMF.
I've read economic texts before, so I was really surprised to be enjoying his tales of helping other countries. His story of stopping Bolivia's hyperinflation is neat-- and he had to overcome the resistance of most of the govt as well as the U.S. diplomats. He was in Poland when they broke free of communism and he tells the daily drama of helping convert their socialist economy to capitalism. Later he covers his failures in Russia and problems in India & China.
But he really developed his "clinical" theory in Africa. While AIDS is a terrible problem in many of its countries, malaria is even worse. Unlike other parts of the world, sub-Saharan African mosquitoes have essentially mutated a preference for biting humans (instead of other mammals) and the region is practically optimized for breeding them. In that part of Africa the humans actually exist as a means of supporting the superior race of mosquitoes. Add in bad transportation geography (a lack of roads & rivers), a lack of irrigation agriculture, plus dry weather-- and most of the countries never get a step up on the prosperity ladder. The sad story is that much of the malaria problems can be avoided by simple equipment like mosquito netting and other 50-cent solutions. Bill Gates has pledged $23B toward a malaria vaccine but this is the world's most stubborn mosquito enclave. In South America, Europe, & India, the govt ministers that he worked with were frequently thrown out of office by the next year's elections. In Africa those people were dying of AIDS or malaria at an even higher rate.
Sachs isn't very enamored of the U.S. govt either. He claims that an effort to eliminate hunger by 20 or so of the world's richest countries could be funded by 0.7% of GDP. (The U.S. is currently funding less than a tenth of that, and hasn't exceeded 0.7% since the Marshall Plan.) He makes a telling point that foreign aid is far cheaper than a strong military, using the Iraq war budget as an example.
His focus is the rest of the world instead of U.S. poverty, however, and he doesn't really discuss how to help the poor who are adrift among the world's highest per capita GDP countries.
Admittedly the book does have maps and some figures & graphs. It bogs down a little in the final chapters on implementing the solutions. But the first few chapters were good enough to carry me through the rest of the book. If you're only going to read one serious world-problem-solving work this year, Sachs makes it easy to understand yet compelling.
"The End of Poverty" tells how he's been helping other areas of the world for the last 20 years-- Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, and even China. He says that economists tend to favor just two or three approaches to solving problems that can actually be caused by eight or nine different factors. Instead of assuming that one symptom is always caused by the same problem, economists need to adopt a more "clinical" approach that depends on their individual knowledge of a country, its culture, and especially its transportation geography. Needless to say Sachs does not like the IMF.
I've read economic texts before, so I was really surprised to be enjoying his tales of helping other countries. His story of stopping Bolivia's hyperinflation is neat-- and he had to overcome the resistance of most of the govt as well as the U.S. diplomats. He was in Poland when they broke free of communism and he tells the daily drama of helping convert their socialist economy to capitalism. Later he covers his failures in Russia and problems in India & China.
But he really developed his "clinical" theory in Africa. While AIDS is a terrible problem in many of its countries, malaria is even worse. Unlike other parts of the world, sub-Saharan African mosquitoes have essentially mutated a preference for biting humans (instead of other mammals) and the region is practically optimized for breeding them. In that part of Africa the humans actually exist as a means of supporting the superior race of mosquitoes. Add in bad transportation geography (a lack of roads & rivers), a lack of irrigation agriculture, plus dry weather-- and most of the countries never get a step up on the prosperity ladder. The sad story is that much of the malaria problems can be avoided by simple equipment like mosquito netting and other 50-cent solutions. Bill Gates has pledged $23B toward a malaria vaccine but this is the world's most stubborn mosquito enclave. In South America, Europe, & India, the govt ministers that he worked with were frequently thrown out of office by the next year's elections. In Africa those people were dying of AIDS or malaria at an even higher rate.
Sachs isn't very enamored of the U.S. govt either. He claims that an effort to eliminate hunger by 20 or so of the world's richest countries could be funded by 0.7% of GDP. (The U.S. is currently funding less than a tenth of that, and hasn't exceeded 0.7% since the Marshall Plan.) He makes a telling point that foreign aid is far cheaper than a strong military, using the Iraq war budget as an example.
His focus is the rest of the world instead of U.S. poverty, however, and he doesn't really discuss how to help the poor who are adrift among the world's highest per capita GDP countries.
Admittedly the book does have maps and some figures & graphs. It bogs down a little in the final chapters on implementing the solutions. But the first few chapters were good enough to carry me through the rest of the book. If you're only going to read one serious world-problem-solving work this year, Sachs makes it easy to understand yet compelling.
