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The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Paperback)
by Jeffrey Sachs
| Category:
Poverty reduction, Poverty fighting, Globalization, Nonfiction |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
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¥ 168.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
The End of Poverty is a top-notch publication and likely the best and most straightforward tome of development economics ever written. |
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Author: Jeffrey Sachs
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Pub. in: February, 2006
ISBN: 0143036580
Pages: 416
Measurements: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00764
Other information: Reprint edition
ISBN-13: 978-0143036586
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- Awards & Credential -
The New York Times Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
The book opens in a most powerful fashion by depicting the tremendous need of impoverished people throughout the developing world. The views, both personal through his visits, and systemic through graphs and charts, make the need apparent.
What the book also does well is describe the many reasons why the cycle of poverty exists. He discusses and dissects the many misconceptions of why many are in poverty. He describes the greatest challenge is overcoming the poverty trap. Several chapters go in depth into the economies of China, Russia, India and other developing countries.
The book does a great job in presenting how certain investments can reverse the cycle of poverty. Human capital, infrastructure, knowledge capital, etc., are all potential ways to influence and lift those suffering out of poverty, however these need to be addressed systemically in order to be effective.
Jeffrey Sachs is an extremely accomplished economist who has been making a tangible impact on the world and its economic situation for many years. Having received his formal training at Harvard in the late 70s, he became an associate professor at the university in 1980 and found himself on the fast track to tenure almost immediately. During his 20 years at Harvard, he was repeatedly invited to serve as a top-level advisor to various nations with struggling transition economies (such as Bolivia, Poland, the former USSR/Russian Federation, India, China, and a number of African states) during the international economic structural adjustment of the 80s and 90s. Sachs' work, ideas, and unprecedented experience have earned him success and built his reputation as the authority on development economics. He was recently among Time Magazine's "100 most influential leaders in the world," and has been called the "world's best-known economist." Serving as an advisor to multiple International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Sachs has been working feverously to build support for the effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) laid out by the UN that, among other things, aim to halve the amount of extreme poverty in the world by 2015. He is currently at Columbia University as the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of The Earth Institute, an institution that is working towards cross-disciplinary solutions to the many problems specific to the developing world. In addition to being the special advisor to Kofi Annan on the MDGs, Sachs is also the Director of the UN Millennium Project.
It remains necessary to briefly outline Sachs' analysis of and proposed solution to the problem of extreme poverty. In the world right now, there are four basic economic categories in the demographic situation. Roughly 1 billion people are considered to be in the lowest economic condition of "extreme poverty." Slightly above them are the 1.5 billion who are deemed "poor," followed by the 2.5 billion who are "middle-income" and the 1 billion who live in the "high-income" world. Clearly, the 2.5 billion people around the globe who together comprise the poor and extremely poor demographic groupings are in a truly bad way and need help to improve their condition. However, the 1 billion extreme, or "absolute," poor are the ones who suffer the most due to the fact that they exist at, or oftentimes below, the level of subsistence. These "...households cannot meet basic needs for survival." (Sachs 20) For a variety of reasons, Sachs explains how these populations have the most needs and, unlike the groups that are higher up the economic ladder, are fundamentally unable to improve their own situation or experience economic growth without foreign assistance.
Furthermore, without adequate attention and help, their problems will only greatly increase, and in short order. The figures show that almost all (93%) of the extreme poor live in three regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. (Sachs 21). Sachs explains in familiar terms how certain socio-economic processes and the total lack of resources leads to the "poverty trap," a confluence of inescapable factors that leaves the poorest populations on the planet vulnerable, isolated, and utterly impoverished. Breaking the poverty trap, in order to help the extreme poor up to a level of self-sufficiency and the beginnings of economic growth and progress, is Sachs' primary aspiration as he goes on to show how it can be done by meeting the MDGs through levels of ODA that would actually be lower than the multi-lateral commitments previously and repeatedly made by the consensus of high-income countries.
A feasible, and apparently effective, strategy and plan is elaborated by Sachs in his book. The two main problems, as he sees it, are that development efforts and strategies in the past have been ineffective, shortsighted, uncoordinated, unpredictable, and coupled with unreasonable conditional agreements. In addition to the many problems in the planning and implementation of prior initiatives, he notes how most of the high-income countries have never provided more than a drastically, woefully insufficient level of real and direct ODA. The largest disparity belongs, obviously, to the United States. For Sachs' strategy to work, it will certainly require a substantial increase in the level of commitment and assistance from the high-income world precipitated by profound US leadership. This obstacle is the biggest hurdle on the path to success because, clearly, most of the developing world is prepared to make the effort towards an improved situation for itself, despite the undeniable hard work that lies ahead. And, thanks to Sachs, the strategy is there too.
Sachs' plan consists of five main parts to be applied to each state that would receive ODA as part of the endeavor to meet the MDGs. There would have to be a detailed "diagnosis" of the state economic situation, a long-term investment plan based on a custom-tailored national strategy designed to break the poverty trap, a financial plan that would determine how the investment plan would be funded, a donor plan that would spell out the multi-year commitments needed from the international community in order to secure a steady and predictable flow of assistance, and a public management plan that would outline how the massive strategy and poverty reduction projects would be administered and monitored. Through this framework, unprecedented, effective investments could be made in the developing world.
These implementation initiatives would be aimed at enhancing the situation within the target state along the lines of Sachs' major investment priorities. They are:
1) Agricultural inputs - to improve agricultural yields to meet basic needs and provide for economic growth
2) Investments in basic health - to reduce child mortality, improve productivity, and increase life expectancy
3) Investments in education - to improve students health, attendance, and performance as well as providing crucial training to others in the communities
4) Power, transport, and communications - to reduce isolation of the people, improve productivity, and ease the task of sending goods to markets
5) Safe drinking water and sanitation - to reduce the amount of time spent securing water for cooking and cleaning while helping to stem the spread of diseases and health problems resulting from unsanitary conditions.
Hopefully, we will be able to accomplish what the author believes we can and eventually see the end of poverty.
- From quoting J. Koenig and Michael Erisman
Target readers:
Readers who are interested in poverty reduction, globalization and international finance
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He is internationally renowned for his work as an economic advisor to governments around the world.
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From the publisher
A landmark exploration of the way out of extreme poverty for the world’s poorest citizens
Among the most eagerly anticipated books of any year, this landmark exploration of prosperity and poverty distills the life work of an economist Time calls one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Sachs’s aim is nothing less than to deliver a big picture of how societies emerge from poverty. To do so he takes readers in his footsteps, explaining his work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, while offering an integrated set of solutions for the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the poorest countries. Marrying passionate storytelling with rigorous analysis and a vision as pragmatic as it is fiercely moral, The End of Poverty is a truly indispensable work.
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| View all 10 comments |
Gordon C. Mccord (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-18 00:00>
I would just like to clarify 2 issues regarding Mr. Zxerce's comment on U.S. development assistance.
First, using numbers from 2000 (as Mr. Zxerce does), the OECD reports that the U.S. gave only $7.4 billion in net official development assistance. Mr. Zxerce claims the government gave $22.6 billion (a number from a USAID report) which includes all money going to developing countries, most of which does not go towards development purposes (a lot goes to Israel; military education, training, and loans; and antiterrorism). The issue is not to focus on total government flows to developing countries, but to report how much of it is actually going towards development (to make investments in health, education, and infrastructure, for example). Prof. Sachs' recent Foreign Affairs piece "The Development Challenge" takes a very detailed look at how U.S. aid is used, showing how little actually makes it to the ground for real development.
Second, the USAID report that Mr. Zxerce's numbers come from claims that private giving to developing countries was $33.6 billion in 2002. However, this is misleading because $18 billion of this amount is individual remittances, which are not development aid at all but income transfers between family members in the United States and abroad. Counting remittances as development assistance would be tantamount to counting incomes of American expatriates sent back to the U.S. as international assistance from the rest of the world to the U.S.
I hope people take time to read the book carefully, as it will help clarify the issues of how much the United States actually gives, and how an increased American effort could help meet the Millennium Development Goals and make a safer and more prosperous world. |
Eric D. Austrew (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-18 00:00>
This book changed my outlook in two ways.
First, it redefined what I think of as poverty. For me and I'm sure for many others who haven't thought about it deeply, "poverty" called up images that ranged from trailer parks to ghettos to third-world sweatshops to famine stricken villages. When Sachs speaks of ending poverty he is referring to extreme poverty of famines and state failures only, and not the relative poverty found in affluent countries. While someone born into a ghetto may not have the same opportunities as someone born in a suburb, they are unlikely to die because of a lack of food, water, or shelter. In countries stricken by extreme poverty, by contrast, millions die each year because "they are too poor to live."
By concentrating on just this set of extremely poor people, Sachs usefully narrows the scope of the problem he wants to address. As a hard-nosed realist, I would take issue with anyone utopian enough to think that relative poverty can be eliminated, especially after the disastorous attempts to do just that by the Communist countries of the last century. But Sachs does not want to give every sweatshop worker a BMW or every trailer park dweller a diamond ring. He wants us to take on the task of restructuring the world so that death because of want no longer happens. It's something that we in the first world have proved is possible, since we have already done it for our own citizens.
This leads to the second way this book changed my outlook. Sachs spends the majority of the book showing how most of the extremely poor people of the world live in countries that simply do not have the capability of helping themselves. Most countries, even those in the third world, have entered the "virtous cycle" of capital accumulation and investment. But in the extremely poor countries all existing capital is consumed simply to stay alive. Indeed, in many cases the amount of capital per person is decreasing thanks to a growing population or environmental degredation. The problems that I had always thought of as the key factors to helping these countries, such as less corruption/better governance or culture factors like women's rights, are not at the root of poverty. In fact, given the in-depth explanations in this book I am now convinced that it is possible to have a perfectly governed, free, and equitable country that is nonetheless doomed to unending poverty and suffering.
The only way out of the poverty trap is an infusion of capital from outside to pay for basic infrastructure and development. That is where our task, and our moral responsibility, begins. If, like me, you always considered poverty an unfortunate but unavoidable condition of the world at large I urge you to read this book. It makes a clear and compelling case that if we commit ourselves we can make the world a radically better place. |
Iago (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-18 00:00>
In "The End of Poverty", Professor Jeffrey Sachs outlines his vision for eradicating poverty, hunger and disease. He makes the argument that this era may be the first one in human history with the ability to eliminate poverty. He places an emphasis on using appropriate techniques and technology to boost agriculture, upgrade educational institutions, improve healthcare and lay down the necessary infrastructure that would be instrumental in changing the state of poverty in the world today. The focus of his argument is the idea that with more money devoted to the problem, poverty can be eliminated.
One of the strengths of this book is its investigation into the root causes of poverty and the misunderstanding by the general public about poverty and those living in a state of poverty. With a lifetime of experiences under his belt, Sachs can intelligently comment on the state of poverty of every continent on the planet--he's literally investigated them all. He also paints a grim picture of the cost of inaction--a cost that is many-fold the cost of tackling the problem here and now.
However, there are some problems with the solutions presented in the book. While Sachs's goals are laudable, his implementation of the actions needed to attain said goals is flawed. He proposes more government involvement, yet in no time in the history of mankind has it been shown that governments act in any way but in their own self-interest. Governments support those who support it--the business sector and similarly empowered segments of the population. If alleviation of poverty has not been accomplished through governments in the past, how is it going to be accomplished now by those same institutions simply via influx of greater capital?
In addition, those institutions have been shown to be inefficient at best and often corrupt at worst. Bureaucracies, especially in developing nations, often divert the funds that are placed at their disposal for poverty eradication projects, to line their own coffers. Sachs fails to note that real progress, real change in the status of the poor has come through grass-roots organizations, NGOs and their like - they are the people who have committed their lives to the causes they work for.
Though I certainly recommend this book, I would say those interested in the subject should pick up, as a counter-point, "India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty" by Dr. Abraham George in which he describes the leading role of NGOs in the process of poverty eradication. Melding some of the ideas presented by Professor Sachs with the solutions presented by Dr. George will give one a firm and realistic idea on how the world can truly "end poverty". |
Pistol Pete (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-18 00:00>
Professor Sachs gives a great tour of the world and its economic problems. He gives personal accounts of helping the economies of Bolivia, Poland, India, Russia and to a limited extent China. Most attempts at helping were successful (Russia, which had deeper and more entrenched problems, was a notable exception). Sachs gives sound advice on what works and what doesn't in really really poor countries. He also lays out how little it would take from America and other developed nations to make it all happen.
The one downside is that for Sachs' plan to work, foreign governments have to be willing to cooperate. It's kind of a Catch-22. The US is not willing to donate large amounts of money if it is used poorly, and foreign governments aren't going to be able to spend wisely if they don't have very much. But really - we are spending hundreds of billions fighting the war in Iraq to "help the Iraqi people". But we could help many more people much more efficiently if we just committed to do it.
Overall, one of the most interesting economics books I have ever read (and I have read a few). |
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