This is a well-written and informative book by Jeffrey Sachs.

The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs.
5/5 rating.
Book #134 of 2019. Read November 26, 2019.

This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read!
Mr. Sachs had been involved all over the world in working with governments and other groups to help turn around impoverished countries and being a champion for the less-fortunate among us.

It was difficult to read through some of this to see how little is currently being done to help the people who most need our help:

"The room is filled with moans. This is a dying chamber where three quarters or more of the people this day are in late-stage AIDS without medicines. Family members sit by the bed, swabbing dried lips and watching their loved ones die. The same doctor who is treating patients across the hall is the doctor in charge of this service. He knows what could be done. He knows that each of these patients could rise from the deathbed but for the want of a dollar a day. He knows the problem is not one of infrastructure or logistics or adherence. He knows that the problem is simply that the world has seen fit to look away as hundreds of impoverished Malawians die this day as a result of their poverty."

Mr. Sachs discusses not only the hard lot of some of the poorest peoples in the world, but also shows success stories and explains why our world is not beyond saving. But it does need our help; that is, from each and every one of us!

If you want to learn what needs to be done to start changing the world, read this book! It's message is too powerful not to spread to the world. It won't be easy, but we are the ones who can make it happen. As Robert Kennedy once said:

"Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills - against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence...Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation..."

Quotes:
"The $450 billion that the United States will spend this year on the military will never buy peace if it continues to spend around one thirtieth of that, just $15 billion, to address the plight of the world's poorest of the poor, whose societies are destabilized by extreme poverty and thereby become havens of unrest, violence, and even global terrorism."
"Bangladesh was born in a war for independence against Pakistan in 1971. That year, it experienced massive famine and disarray, leading an official in Henry Kissinger's State Department to famously label it an 'international basket case.' Bangladesh today is far from a basket case. Per capita income has approximately doubled since independence. Life expectancy has risen from forty-four years to sixty-two years. The infant mortality rate (the number of children who die before their first birthday for every 1,000 born) has declined from 145 in 1970 to 48 in 2002. Bangladesh shows us that even in circumstances that seem the most hopeless there are ways forward if the right strategies are applied, and if the right combination of investments is made."
"These sweatshop jobs are the targets of public protest in developed countries; those protests have helped to improve the safety and quality of the working conditions. The rich-world protesters, however, should support increased numbers of such jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh. These young women already have a foothold in the modern economy that is a critical, measurable step up from the villages of Malawi (and more relevant for the women, a step up from the villages of Bangladesh where most of them were born). The sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty."
"They are wrong because the world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss, but is rather a positive-sum opportunity in which improving technologies and skills can raise living standards around the world."
"With growth of 0.7 percent per annum, Africa's initial income (roughly $400 per capita) increased by little more than three-fold, to roughly $1,300 per capita as of the year 1998, compared with an almost twenty-five-fold increase in the United States. Today's twenty-fold gap in income between the United States and Africa, therefore, results from a three-fold gap as of 1820, which was magnified seven times by the difference in annual growth rates of 1.7 percent in the United States versus 0.7 percent in Africa."
"Many people assume that the rich have gotten rich because the poor have gotten poor. In other words, they assume that Europe and the United States used military force and political strength during and after the era of colonialism to extract wealth from the poorest regions, and thereby to grow rich. This interpretation of events would be plausible if gross world product had remained roughly constant, with a rising share going to the powerful regions and a declining share going to the poorer regions. However, this is not at all what happened. Gross world product rose nearly fifty-fold. Every region of the world experienced some economic growth (both in terms of the overall size of the economy, and even when measured per person), but some regions experienced much more growth than others. The key fact of modern times is not the transfer of income from one region to another, by force or otherwise, but rather the overall increase in world income, but at a different rate in different regions.
This is not to say that the rich are innocent of the charge of having exploited the poor. They surely have, and the poor continue to suffer as a result in countless ways, including chronic problems of political instability. However, the real story of modern economic growth has been the ability of some regions to achieve unprecedented long-term increases in total production to levels never before seen in the world, while other regions stagnated, at least by comparison. Technology has been the main force behind the long-term increases in income in the rich world, not exploitation of the poor. That news is very good indeed because it suggests that all of the world, including today's laggard regions, has a reasonable hope of reaping the benefits of technological advance. Economic development is not a zero-sum game in which the winnings of some are inevitably mirrored by the losses of others. This game is one that everybody can win."
"The main objective of economic development for the poorest countries is to help these countries to gain a foothold on the ladder. The rich countries do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the ladder. After that, the tremendous dynamism of self-sustaining economic growth can take hold."
"Sadly, there were self-serving and ideological aspects of the structural adjustment era's failures of advice and insufficient help. The self-serving aspect is clear. The responsibilities for poverty reduction were assumed to lie entirely with the poor countries themselves. Increased foreign financial assistance was deemed not to be needed. Indeed, foreign aid per person in the poor countries plummeted during the 1980s and 1990s. Aid per person in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, expressed in constant 2002 dollars, fell from $32 per African in 1980 to just $22 per African in 2001, during a period in which Africa's pandemic diseases ran rampant, and needs for increased public spending were stark. Donors thought that they had done everything they could, with any remaining problems caused by issues beyond their responsibility."
"Bolivia gave me my first insights into the problem of economic development. I began to understand vividly how much I would have to learn to be able to give sound guidance on critical issues of development. I would never again be an economist who would neglect a crucial 'detail' about a country, such as its being mountainous or landlocked or at war with a neighbor. I became ever more attuned to a country's resource base, climate, topography, political relations with neighbors, internal ethnic and political divisions, and proximity to world markets. In short, I started realizing that I needed to be a clinician with the skills of differential diagnosis."
"Still, the experience of hearing no, no, no, eventually followed by yes, has deeply affected my view of policy advocacy. I do not take as a given what is considered politically impossible, but rather I am prepared to argue incessantly, and annoyingly, for what needs to be done, even when it is claimed to be impossible."
"By the time a society has fallen deep into crisis, it almost always needs some external help to get back on track. Countries are like individuals in trouble who need the help of their families, friends, counselors, and public programs, and can rarely simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps."
"Almost all countries have received important help at some point: The United States received French support during the War of Independence. Europe and Japan received extensive U.S. aid after World War II, as did Korea a decade later. Israel has received vast financial support from the United States. Germany and Poland had their debts canceled. We should be wary of excessive moralizing, or telling the poorest or the most vulnerable or crisis-struck peoples in the world simply to solve their own problems."
"The West's failure to help had very high costs. The Russian people were optimistic at the beginning. They had become deeply cynical, and deeply demoralized, by the end of the 1990s. Democracy had a very bright chance in the early 1990s, with new institutions of free speech and a newly independent media. By the end of the decade, the optimism had vanished, and Russians were again searching for a strong leader with centralized power. When the reformers did not get the help they needed, they were replaced by gray apparatchiks and corrupt wealth seekers."
"When it comes to charges of bad governance, the West should be a bit more circumspect. Little surpasses the western world in the cruelty and depredations that it has long imposed on Africa. Three centuries of slave trade, from around 1500 to the early 1800s, were followed by a century of brutal colonial rule. Far from lifting Africa economically, the colonial era left Africa bereft of educated citizens and leaders, basic infrastructure, and public health facilities. The borders of the newly independent states followed the arbitrary lines of the former empires, dividing ethnic groups, ecosystems, watersheds, and resource deposits in arbitrary ways."
"Both the critics of African governance and the critics of Western violence and meddling have it wrong. Politics, at the end of the day, simply cannot explain Africa's prolonged economic crisis. The claim that Africa's corruption is the basic source of the problem does not withstand practical experience or serious scrutiny."
"Yet the more I saw, the more I realized that although predatory governance can soundly trounce economic development, good governance and market reforms are not sufficient to guarantee growth if the country is in a poverty trap."
"To understand - and overcome - such crises, it would be necessary to unravel the interconnections between extreme poverty, rampant disease, unstable and harsh climate conditions, high transport costs, chronic hunger, and inadequate food production."
"It is worth restating the central fact: malaria is utterly treatable, yet it still claims around three million lives per year, overwhelmingly in Africa. Low-cost treatments exist, but they do not reach the poor. These statistics boggled my mind, as does the current estimate that malaria causes up to five billion clinical cases per year. Virtually everybody in tropical Africa contracts the illness at least once a year."
"If you want to get someone's attention about the health crises in Africa, 'show them the money.' Help them to understand the economic costs of the disease pandemics, as well as the economics of disease control. Above all, propose practical solutions based on a rigorous emphasis on economic costs and benefits."
"Africa gets a bad rap as the 'corrupt continent.' Even when such sentiments are not racist in intent, they survive in our societies as conventional wisdom because of existing widespread racism. Many African governments are desperately trying to do the right thing, but they face enormous obstacles of poverty, disease, ecological crisis, and geopolitical neglect or worse."
"Terrorism is not the only threat that the world faces. It would be a huge mistake to direct all our energies, efforts, resources, and lives to the fight against terrorism while leaving vast and even greater challenges aside. Almost three thousand people died needlessly and tragically at the World Trade Center on September 11; ten thousand Africans die needlessly and tragically every single day - and have died every single day since September 11 - of AIDS, TB, and malaria. We need to keep September 11 in perspective, especially because the ten thousand daily deaths are preventable."
"To fight terrorism, we will need to fight poverty and deprivation as well."
"Whatever the official data show about 'stagnant' rural incomes in places like Sauri, stagnation is a euphemism for decline and early death. Food output per person is falling; malaria is pervasive and increasing; AIDS stalks the community and the region, with adult prevalence on the order of 30 percent, if not higher."
"I asked how many households had somebody currently suffering from malaria. Around three fourths of the hands shot up. How many used antimalarial bed nets? Two out of two hundred hands went up. How many knew about bed nets? All hands. And how many would like to use bed nets? All hands remained up. The problem, many of the women explained, is that they cannot afford the bed nets, which sell for a few dollars per net, and are too expensive even when partially subsidized (socially marketed) by international donor agencies. How many in the community were using medicine to treat a bout of malaria? A few hands went up, but the vast majority remained down. A woman launched into an explanation that the medicines sell at prices well beyond what the villagers can afford."
"The villagers explained that they could not afford to pay the doctor and buy the medicines, so the doctor departed. Now they fend for themselves without health care or medicines. When malaria gets bad, and their children fall into anemia-induced tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), gasping for breath in small, ravaged bodies deprived of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, they rush the child to the subdistrict hospital in nearby Yala. The mothers may carry the children on their backs or push them in wheelbarrows for several kilometers over dirt paths."
"The extreme poor don't even have enough to eat, much less to pay for electricity or water or bed nets or contraceptives. The history of user fees imposed on the poor is a history of the poor being excluded from basic services."
"The UN Millennium Project, following the similar recommendations of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH) recommends that user fees should be dropped entirely for essential health services and primary education in poor countries. As for the water, sanitation, and power, the project strongly endorses the use of lifeline tariffs, explained earlier. In that system, every household gets a guaranteed fixed supply of electricity and safe water; above that amount, they pay by the meter."
"The behavior of the creditor countries in recent decades compares very poorly with the U.S. commitment and practice during the formulation of the Marshall Plan, when it decided to help rebuild Europe with grants rather than loans. The post-World War II planners knew well the disastrous experience after World War I, when, as Keynes had foretold, allied war debts and post-World War I reparations claims entangled creditor and debtor nations in a prolonged political and financial crisis that contributed to the Great Depression and indirectly to the rise of fascism. After World War II, U.S. strategists chose a different course, ensuring that postwar debts would not encumber Europe's fragile democracies. We would do well to emulate that wisdom today. It is time for the debts of the highly indebted poor countries to be cancelled outright as part of the financing package for the Millennium Goals-based poverty reduction strategies."
"Most important, the task can be achieved within the limits that the rich world has already committed: 0.7 percent of the gross national product of the high-income world, a mere 7 cents out of every $10 in income. All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1 percent of rich-world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world, 'You count for nothing.'"
"Of the total $75 billion or so rise in foreign aid (in 2003 dollars), 51 percent (roughly $38 billion) would be due from the United States. Japan would account for 18 percent (roughly $13 billion), and Germany, France, Italy, and the UK would account for 20 percent (roughly $15 billion)."
"The U.S. government has argued recently that development assistance from private U.S. citizens and the nonprofit sector (faith-based organizations, philanthropies, foundations, NGO'S) makes up for much of the shortfall in official aid. The evidence at hand does not bear this out. The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD has compiled cross-country data on nongovernmental development assistance. The estimate for the United States is about $3 billion per year, an amount that raises the total U.S. development assistance from 0.15 percent of GNP to 0.18 percent of GNP, still leaving the United States at the very bottom of the donor list."
"The difference was astounding: the $57 billion in combined income of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda in 2000 was the income of 161 million people, who average $350 in income per year, whereas the $69 billion was the income of four hundred individuals."

Just read Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz instead of this book. Stiglitz says everything Sach's book says but with greater clarity and depth. Also Stiglitz's book doesn't have a foreword by Bono.

Insightful and compelling. Jeffrey Sachs shares his vast wealth of experience in helping turn around struggling economies from South America to Africa to Asia and Eastern Europe. I appreciated his concise introduction and overview to the economic history of the world; the comprehensive approach to diagnosing the poverty problem; the courage to stand up to the financial power-players of the world; his ability to decipher the nuances and merits of the antiglobalist movement's intentions without supporting the antiglobalist agenda; his appeal to governments, corporations, and individuals to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and make extreme poverty a thing of the past. A thorough education.

I would have given it fewer stars if it weren't for the interesting stuff Sachs included about economic planning failures (minus Poland) that he had a hand in. All the stuff about ending poverty made me want to puke. Read William Easterly instead. Sachs is ridiculous.

This book was written by left-leaning Jeffrey Sachs, who you can see on Morning Joe at least once a week.
n  n


This book was a more interesting read than I thought it would be. I assumed Sachs would just say to take American taxpayer money and give it to 3rd world countries. Well, he did say that, but he also discussed the reasons many countries are impoverished.

Certainly the United States is at an advantage when it comes to our form of government, our economic model, our natural resources, and our proximity to water.

Now that it is 2012 and the national debt of the United States is almost $16 trillion, the value of the Euro is in question, and Greece and Spain are on the brink--the question of "What money?" must be raised. While the United States is not in the dire straits of Greece, we have wasted away stability by allowing the Fed and politicians to artificially inflate the money supply and go deep into debt.

Sometimes helping other countries works (Poland) and other times it doesn't (Haiti). I think encouraging charitable organizations to help with food and clean water programs is a great idea. I also think America has much to do to clean up its financial problems--please not another bloated government program!

The book starts with a very important assertion which is capitalism helps to reduce poverty. He rejects protectionism and high inflation. He explains poverty as a disease and each country suffers from a different one which requires a deep diagnosis. There is no one cure for all. For him poverty is a trap from which people can escape if they have enough savings. The core idea of the book is that aid is the key to overcome poverty or at least not to remain in the trap. The author is a development economist who helped many countries in trouble so his field experience should be taken seriously. He tells us stories about how he managed to solve the countries' economical problems which include the promotion of market and foreign investment friendly environment. I gave the book one star less because he finds the solution in foreign aid only and he is very optimistic about governments and their managements.

The first half of the book was a fascinating and insightful economic perspective of various countries at critical turning points in their history. The second half of the book turned too preachy.

Oh Jeff...can I call you Jeff? No? Ok. Dr. Sachs, you're ideas are way too lofty and boring, but you're really enthusiastic about them so everyone likes you. I only think you're OK. What happens when all of Bono's money goes into the pockets of corrupt dictators? Will he be able to afford more sunglasses so he can continue to have pictures of himself taken with brown kids in the bright African sun? I think he will. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in those bright African places will continue stay stagnant and poor.

Well written and intriguing, but I was looking for more of a boots on the ground directive of how to help those in poverty. This does give a great overview of the history and the situation and the fix.

An excellent book about developmental economics. While Jeffrey Sachs is criticized for being "too naive" in this book by some others who work in this field, I for one appreciated his optimistic--yet grounded in reality--approach to how to reduce poverty in developing countries. I especially enjoyed the first half of the book which was a surprisingly fast read. It includes specific examples of various economies, e.g., Bolivia, Poland, Russia, China, India, Africa, and the unique challenges and successes faced by them. The second half of the book is much more abstract and theoretical which made it a bit more challenging to read, but nonetheless I found it very instructive. The other criticism of Jeffrey Sachs I've come across is that people accuse him of promoting himself in the book and having a big ego. Okay, so he does make a few references to himself and the positive role in played in various situations. Frankly, I found it neither excessive, nor self-aggrandizing...I see nothing wrong with him getting credit for all the good he did (e.g., loan forgiveness) for the poverty-stricken masses (which is much more than 99.99% of his critics have done I would guess). Highly recommended!

Generation X seems to have missed out on causes greater than ourselves. The Greatest Generation had World War II. The baby boomers had efforts to overcome racial discrimination and end the war in Vietnam. Gen X'ers have enjoyed economic prosperity and although there were events going on in the world where we should have stood up and rallied the nation around the need to do the right thing (ending genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur come to mind), we opted to continue the materialistic pursuits chronicled in the media during our formative years in the '80s and exemplified by the movie Wall Street ("Greed is good").

Sachs outlines a cause we can and should all support, namely, ending extreme poverty in the world within 30 years. As an econ major, I enjoyed reviewing the figures Sachs provided, but I know that certain sections of the book are dry reading for many. Regardless, the case is clearly made that as lofty as his stated goal may sound, it is more than possible. It is entirely realistic, but it will require that the US stand behind its commitments to the global community. If we simply allocate 0.7% of the world's GDP to a concerted effort to improve infrastructure, technology, and farming methods in Africa and Asia, extreme poverty will no longer exist on this planet.

How do you rally the nations of the world around this cause? One convert at a time. And it begins by reading this book.