A new way to think of global economics, for sure. I need some time to process his concept of capitalism with a heart as the best vehicle for social justice. I can respect the way Sachs tries to find a middle ground between dog-eat-dog free-market systems and closed authoritarian systems. A little repetitive at the end and not super well-written.

I found Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty to be extremely enlightening and informative on the issues of poverty, globalization, and the issues developing countries face that prevent them to achieve the first steps towards economic development. I'll admit to having no prior knowledge or experience in this area, especially in economics. There were parts of the book where I became confused by the data explained and density of the writing, but, in general, Sachs' ideas are easy to comprehend and clarified in very specific detail. Sachs shows how all issues, like climate, health, poverty, technology, etc., are interconnected and effective different communities. Sachs passionately argues on what the reader and the global community can do to help improve the conditions of impoverished countries and communities. Additionally in the book, Sachs describes his work as an economist and advisor to other countries, like Bolivia, Poland, and India. His recount of his experience in those countries are fascinating to read about and I don't find myself saying that often about economics. This book was thorough, thoughtful, and gave the reader information that appears very practical to implement. After finishing The End of Poverty , I definitely felt Sachs' call to action to end extreme poverty.

Fantastic, thought-provoking, well-researched book with compelling arguments and sound rhetoric.

Seeing as this book was published 18 years ago, some of the stats are outdated/irrelevant to the current times, and I found myself fast-reading these sections. The overall ideas about working together (globally) to address this issue is something I think we should still be talking about and supporting. Also tax the super rich.

Good introductory book to development, foreign aid, etc. Sachs brings easy-to-read insights from his experiences advising leaders of lower and middle-income nations in Europe and South America that are instructive but leave me wanting more of a layered picture beyond "policy designed and implemented successfully". He gives a great walkthrough of the various challenges and solutions (macro and micro) that have been proposed and saved lives in the 20th century. Notably, this book spends significant time discussing the American talk and walk around foreign aid which is helpful given how large of a presence the US government plays globally.

He spends a lot of time proposing different solutions towards development, all of which have good evidence but I'm not a big fan of how he spends significant time repeatedly asking rich nations and individuals to give x% of their income to alleviate world poverty in one go. The solution is not as simple as getting enough funding to donating millions of mosquito nets and I wish he spent more time acknowledging the geopolitical angle of aid rather than simply asking for more money.

I do think that a lot of things have changed since this book has actually come out but I do really appreciate the way that Jeffrey Sachs thinks about poverty and makes it something that everyone can understand and understand his reasoning behind his proposals. It definitely made me think and made me question what we are doing in our world today to eradicate extreme poverty as well as think about reasons why some nations and areas of the world are in extreme poverty and some of the biases that continue to be held about why that is and what is founded and how a lot of it is completely unfounded.

CORRUPTION IS NOT THE CAUSE OF POVERTY
IT'S THE UNFORTUNATE ORIGIN

It greatly signifies poverty, a problem that must be handled with infallible plan, with efforts from everywhere around the world is must. Thanks to it's simple use of language, I was able to understand myriad basics and background details of economic development and governance in a respectable degree. But it almost felt like a guide book (like a youtube video tutorial hehe

The End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs is one part flex, one part theory, and one part redundantly asking for money. I actually enjoyed the first two parts but found myself bored and uninterested having to wade through the third.

Sachs begins his book discussing his different experiences being brought in as an economic advisor helping restructure economies ranging from Bolivia to Poland to India. As someone studying economics at university, it was interesting to see the practical uses of the theory learned in class. When pure economic theory is free to be applied, it can actually do good. I know there is more nuance to economics than this, but I enjoyed the behind the scenes look at how approached economic reforms.

As for his theory, I was more divided but still intrigued. His arguments relating overall prosperity to physical geography rubbed me the wrong way initially; however, Sachs eventually provided enough context and examples to win me over. My favorite theory was his idea of clinical economics. The oft-seen issue with economics is how often it just doesn't work. That's because it is applied uniformly without looking at the surrounding context the economic problem is situated in. Sachs' idea to transform the application of economics to mirror the application of medicine lessens this obstacle and leads to better economic outcomes. Sachs emphasizes throughout the book how important local context is to the success of economic policy. Some policies just won't work in a country because of culture, geography, education, public support, etc.

Sachs' solution to the problem of global poverty was to have the US and other developed countries contribute more aid to poor countries. He spends what feels like half the book reiterating this point. He argues that the US could easily increase aid to 0.7% of GNP and that it would hardly amount to anything for such a wealthy nation. While this may be true, he fails to create a convincing argument as to why this money should go abroad in the form of aid rather than used domestically to serve our own people. His arguments keep circling on how this isn't much money which quickly became repetitive and made the second half of the book boring.

I would recommend reading the first half of this book simply for his experiences and take on clinical economics.

Poor Jeffrey Sachs. He reminds me of the autistic kid in elementary school who isn't sure why no one likes reading the marginalia of comic books as much as he does. After all, the other kids like Spiderman too. So why doesn't everyone else want to do the cross-referencing (I may have been awfully close to being that kid)?

Jeffrey Sachs' basic perspective is that all we have to do to solve poverty is pump aid money in and engage in debt relief. Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that he was largely responsible (intellectually, and to a certain extent in practice) for disastrous shock programs in Eastern Europe that threw millions into sudden poverty, provided a fertile ground for the rise of crony capitalists of the worst order, and largely fueled the rise of neo-fascism, but let's look at his starry-eyed worldview, a world in which if enough nice people do nice things, everything will be nicer.

But he ignores everything that would prevent this from happening, because he's, I'm guessing a very personable head-in-the-clouds idealist. He's right to criticize "cultural" explanations of poverty, and right to criticize the IMF and World Bank for keeping countries poor. And yet he ignores the brutal realities of extractive economies, the ways in which foreign capital colludes with militaries and gleefully ignores local laws, and the ways in which the aid machine pats donors' backs without making a real difference.

I think everything I have to say is better said by other reviewers (Especially Doug Henwood, review here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/... and Nina Munk’s The Idealist, summarized here: https://psmag.com/social-justice/smar...). I would encourage anyone who thinks that Sach’s neoliberal economics would save the world take a look at Sach’s history both before the book and after in his Millenium Villages. When I read the book, I thought he was a kind although misguided economist trying to fit the problems of the world into his economic framework. After looking at other reviewers and getting a broader perspective, it seems that Sachs is an egomaniac who wants to be known not for saving the world, but for someone years from now to say he was right, despite ignoring evidence that could harm his arguments.

Lets say 3.5 stars. The beginning of the book hold too much self-promoting lines, giving us his Curriculum Vitae, instead of educating the reader. This tainted my perception of the author, which will show below. The first part of Sachs explaining how he stopped inflation in some countries does not serve any real purpose in the book other than put himself on a legitimate pedestal and maybe educate the reader a tiny bit on inflation. But the example of Bolivia does not link to other parts of the book. Other aspects are self-explained : to find poverty, we need to invest in education, health and so on...

Luckily, the end of the book is far more interesting. The main point of the books is essentially that ending poverty is possible and easy to do if countries the pledge and goal that they themselves set, meaning 0.7% of their GDP to Official Development Assistance (ODA) or money to poor countries. Sachs argues with reasonable arguments and demonstration that if ODA didn't seems to bring any changes, it is simply because it was never much, or undercut by other factors as debt repayment to the same countries and so on. The second point made by Sachs is that, there exist a certain threshold for ODA commited by rich countries to be effective, because of the poverty trap, in which devaluation of capital occur faster than the gain made from it. In that sense, International assistance is still making change, but never lasting changes unless real commitment is made.

To read if you wish to know the basic of ODA and debates that are still going on today.
In Resume, his major points are :

- Particularities of each country need to be considered for their development. Sachs then call for a revolutionary, never heard " Clinical Economics" ( which seem to not have caught on yet as I read it). This is in reaction of the bad recommendations and advice given by international institutions to developing countries. This is also demonstrated by the cases of reform in different country like Russia trying to base its reform model on China, without considering that the share of industrial vs rural workers is reversed.

- Debt Service of developing country to rich countries is BAD counterproductive.

- The poverty trap is a real phenomenon ( to understand it, I think the book" Poor Economics" by Esther Duflo and Banerjee is a JEWEL and totally worth reading).

- Poverty is in big parts explained by geographic advantages /disadvantages ( This can be debated however. One of my current readings, "How Asia Works", actually show that this argument does not always make sense if criteria comparason are made).

- Bad Governance and corruption is often an overstated factor, that actually play less a role in poverty of countries that people assume. Most of those cliche rely on stereotype, and relationship between poverty and corruption or bad governance is not causal. This is supported by comparison of GDP and corruption index of different countries.

-Aid should be better coordinated by: Using multilateral and regional institutions to deploy "packages" addressing interconnected dimension of poverty ( Health, education....See the Millennium Development Goals), but also following plans specifically developed by the receiving countries and made specifically for them.

I was more impressed by this book than I thought I would be. My distaste for Jeffery Sachs stems from his intervention in Eastern Europe specifically Poland where I thought his "shock therapy" was unnecessary and determintal to people as much as it was good for macroeconomic statistics. His blase dismissal of the middle age workforce he acknowledged was disrupted and hurt by his policies did little to impress me. The first part of the book recounts his Polish and other experiences and are far more interesting than the second part where he lays out in an alphabet soup of agencies, reports and goals that he thinks may be helpful. Its apparent that he has learned from his experience and is less market inclined thah he was initially. However, he still fails to credit non-market policies when he should. India's jump into the IT world as opposed to the traditional sweatshop labour of most Third World countries stems from Nehru's education policies. Nehru fails to recieve proper credit and is dismissed as the License Raj for his fondness of bureacracy.

Early in the book Sachs points out Africa is not poor and rich nations are not rich because of slavery and exploitation. I know, what? Economists since at least Adam Smith have explained how slavery destroyed human capital (aka wealth.) The abolition of slavery is one of those developments in the last couple 100 years that has given us the modern world and exponential wealth creation. I would go further and point out that since slavery only destroys wealth that rich nations today would be even more rich and advanced than they are had slavery and exploitation of Africa never happened. One might not agree with this statement but if true (I completely agree with Sachs that it is) the cool implication is that Africa and developing nations elsewhere do not need another Africa to exploit and enslave to be lifted out of poverty themselves. He does go into some detail enumerating some of the reasons and advantages England and northern Europe had that gave us the boom of the industrial revolution. Some of these benefits included public education, literacy, coal deposits, functioning markets, property rights, modern banking, rivers and a good a canal network, public sanitation, to name just a few. We in the rich world can learn from what has worked and what hasn’t and assist in lifting others. Modern nations don’t need to have coal close by to have power, airports, cell phones.

For me the most exciting concept from Sachs in this book is what he calls “Clinical Economics.” Call it what you want. The reality is an ever growing number of great minds are working on the challenge of lifting impoverished nations. Someone pointed out to me many years ago that Man is really good at accomplishing priorities, ending slavery, fixing the dust bowl, developing vaccines, building public schools, putting a man on the moon, putting roads across continents. Our only challenge is coming up with the right priorities. In the pages of this work we might disagree on one point or another but the main takeaway here is that Man has set lifting everyone as a top priority.

My only problem with Sachs in these pages is that he does tend to argue the fix to all the under developed world’s problems is just tax the rich countries and everything will be quickly fixed. Despite my admiration for him I’m not fully sold on this idea. Regardless, the book is filled with great economic concepts and well worth reading.