Book Review: The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs

In The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Jeffrey D. Sachs presents a compelling analysis of global poverty and outlines a strategic framework for its eradication. Published in 2005, the book draws on Sachs’s extensive experience as an economist and advisor to various countries, offering both a critical examination of current economic policies and a hopeful vision for the future. With a focus on evidence-based strategies, Sachs argues that poverty can be eliminated within our lifetime, provided that concerted efforts are made by governments, international organizations, and individuals.

Summary and Key Themes
Understanding Poverty: Sachs begins by defining poverty and its multifaceted nature. He emphasizes that poverty is not solely an economic issue but also encompasses social, political, and environmental dimensions. By illustrating the interconnectedness of these factors, he sets a comprehensive backdrop for the discussions that follow.

The “Big Push” Strategy: Central to Sachs’s argument is the concept of the “Big Push,” which advocates for large-scale investments in health, education, and infrastructure in the world’s poorest regions. He insists that modest, incremental changes are insufficient and that substantial financial resources must be mobilized to create significant impact. This approach underscores his belief in the transformative potential of targeted development initiatives.

Case Studies and Global Perspectives: Throughout the book, Sachs provides numerous case studies from countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, and Bangladesh, demonstrating successful implementations of his proposed strategies. These examples serve to illustrate not only the feasibility of his approach but also the importance of tailored solutions that consider local contexts and needs.

Role of International Cooperation: Sachs strongly advocates for enhanced international cooperation and responsibility in addressing global poverty. He criticizes the inadequacies of current aid systems and calls for reforms that would enable more effective resource allocation. By emphasizing the need for collaboration between rich and poor nations, he highlights the moral imperative of global citizenship in the fight against poverty.

A Call to Action: The concluding sections of the book deliver a powerful call to action, urging readers—policymakers, philanthropists, and everyday citizens alike—to take responsibility for eradicating poverty. Sachs provides a hopeful vision, suggesting that with the right strategies and commitments, the end of poverty is achievable, and he emphasizes that such efforts will ultimately benefit the global community.

Critical Analysis
The End of Poverty is an ambitious and thought-provoking work that combines academic rigor with a passionate plea for change. Sachs’s writing is accessible, engaging, and backed by substantial empirical evidence, making complex economic concepts understandable for a wide audience. His use of firsthand experiences from his work in various countries lends credibility to his arguments and provides readers with a sense of urgency about the crisis of global poverty.

One of the book’s strengths is its holistic approach, which recognizes that poverty is influenced by various factors, including health, education, and governance. This multifaceted perspective allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges at hand and the potential strategies for overcoming them.

However, some critics argue that Sachs may be overly optimistic about the feasibility of his proposals, particularly regarding the political will required for implementing substantial reforms. While his vision is inspiring, the book could benefit from a more nuanced discussion of the political and institutional barriers that often complicate the path toward poverty eradication.

Conclusion
In The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Jeffrey D. Sachs makes a compelling case for the eradication of global poverty through coordinated international efforts and strategic investments in development. His passionate advocacy and practical insights provide a roadmap for policymakers and activists alike. While acknowledging the complexities of poverty, Sachs maintains an optimistic outlook, urging a collective commitment to creating a more equitable world. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in global development, economics, and social justice, as it challenges readers to envision a future where poverty is no longer a defining characteristic of human existence.

A rallying whimper

JDN 24565554 PDT 20:54.

A review of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

This should have been one of the greatest books ever written. It should have been the rallying cry for a radical new approach to global development, a seminal advance in what it means to do economics—it should have been quite literally a book to save a billion lives.
tAnd make no mistake, Jeffrey Sachs has a project that really does have the potential to have that kind of impact. But The End of Poverty doesn't quite manage to sell that project, for reasons that are not all that easy to pin down.
tI think part of the problem is that Sachs was trained as a neoclassical economist and hasn't quite managed to break free from this indoctrination. This makes Sachs, and thus The End of Poverty, of two minds: On the one hand he wants to say that the Washington Consensus has failed, capitalism is in crisis, and we are approaching a fundamental paradigm shift in development economics. On the other hand, he keeps talking about market incentives and rational expectations, and dismisses socialism as an obvious failure—even though many of the reforms he wants are in some sense socialist reforms. I couldn't find the passage when I looked back to quote it, but there's even a section where he talks about the shift from communism to capitalism and says "only then did unemployment emerge" and makes it sound like a good thing. It's really bizarre; rather than saying, "Yes, these workers had to bear the pain of unemployment, but in the long run the market reforms were necessary and made everyone better off," he actually speaks as though he thinks laying off all those state employees was intrinsically beneficial.
tAt the end of the book he calls upon us to see past narrow self-interest and work to create the world we want to live in. This is exactly right; and like him, I do believe it is possible. But in earlier pages he talks about how collective farms obviously fail because they don't have market incentives... and I find myself asking, "Well, why couldn't they see past narrow self-interest?"
tMuch of what Sachs says is not only right, it is desperately needed. His message sounds like a pipe dream—ending poverty in less than 20 years?—but his economic sophistication is undeniable. He not only shows how it can be done, he calculates how much it would cost and what would be the most efficient way to pay for it. The number he derives is now widely accepted by development economists, yet so few laypeople comprehend it: $100 billion per year. 0.7% of GDP. That's how much the United States would need to spend; the rest of the First World, mostly Europe and Japan, would add another $100 billion. And that's it. That's all it would take. For less than 1% of our total income, we could end extreme poverty forever.
tNow, to be fair, this is extreme poverty—it's the kind of crushing poverty that leaves you starving in a rusting shack made of corrugated steel in a slum by the train tracks in Ghana. Sachs is not proposing to eliminate relative poverty—the dramatic difference between the richest and the poorest in the US—and it's not clear whether his plan would even fully eradicate absolute poverty—the state in which some people don't have enough to meet their basic needs. There are some things that might be considered "basic needs", especially in a First World society (like electricity, transportation, and dentistry) that might still remain out of reach for some of the world's poor. But Sachs' proposal really does have a serious chance of ensuring that everyone in the world has food to eat, water to drink, shelter to live in, and basic medical care. Sachs asks us to imagine a world without starvation or malaria, and then provides concrete steps we could take right now to get us closer to that world.
tThe problem is, Sachs appears torn between the neoclassical concept of selfishness and an idealistic concept of altruism. What he needs is a fundamentally new paradigm, something that is neither selfishness nor altruism—what he needs is what I call the tribal paradigm. Humans are not selfish individual utility maximizers; indeed, one would have to be a psychopath to act that way. But nor are we selfless altruists, giving everything we have to anyone who asks. The default setting for human moral intuition is tribalism—it is to think in terms of an "in group" that we are altruistic toward, and an "out group" that we are not. Put another way, our unit of rational action is the tribe, not the individual.
tI'm actually working on how I might work this into an empirical paper or an econometric argument—perhaps my master's thesis will ultimately be titled, "The Tribal Paradigm"—but for now, let me offer some illustrative examples.
tAre racists selfish? Is it acting in your self-interest to hate Black people? No, it isn't. Indeed, the reason neoclassicists have thus far utterly failed to explain or respond to racism is that it couldn't exist within their model of human behavior. There would always be a market incentive to not be racist, because whatever the color of their skin, the color of their money is the same. But does this mean racists are altruistic? It certainly seems odd to say so; if they're such altruists, shouldn't they be nicer to Black people? The answer is that they are tribalists—they are altruistic to their in-group (White people) and not to those outside it.
tHere's another example, particularly relevant to economics: We often speak of "the firm" or "firms" as economic agents with well-defined interests and actions. Sometimes we speak of "the government" in a similar way. But for fundamental game-theory reasons, there's no reason to think that the interests of a firm are the same as the interests of any individual in that firm, or even necessarily an aggregate of all their interests put together. Yet we can with some accuracy predict the behavior of firms by assuming they are self-interested agents; how? Because sometimes people identify with the company as their tribe. And let's be honest: Who in the US government doesn't think of the US government, or the American people as a whole, as their tribe? You have to at least convincingly fake such tribalism to even be elected—we call this "patriotism".
t I certainly hope Sachs succeeds. I just wish he were a little better at selling it.

One of Cambridge Sustainability's Top 50 Books for Sustainability, as voted for by our alumni network of over 3,000 senior leaders from around the world. To find out more, click here.

The End of Poverty argues that extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as having an income of less than $1 a day, is 'the poverty that kills'. However, it is almost entirely preventable and solvable (as has been shown in developed countries and many developing countries) through the provision of basic services in water, sanitation, healthcare and food. Hence, the end of poverty is not only possible, but also morally imperative.

Sachs challenges the wholly pessimistic view of poverty, pointing out that five-sixths of the world have excaped extreme poverty due to the scientific and industrial revolution, which has raised living standards and life expectancy. This shows that development does work, and that the remaining one billion poor are not inevitably condemned to remain destitute.

The first two thirds of the book is about interesting case studies of countries that have managed to reduce or eradicate extreme poverty in their populations. The last third of the book lags as he describes in great detail his recommendations for how to fix the problem of extreme poverty; it reads like a textbook. The book suffers a bit from his sometimes pompous writing but I did learn a great deal about international economics.

Another book written by a rich caucasian on how to solve "Third World" problems. Sachs floats a lot of "economic theories" and Bono throws in his bit as well. Understandably so, they've never walked a mile in a poor person's shoes. Some things are just as nature intended. We cannot all be wealthy CEOs, who'll do the ground work?. Intervention does more harm than good, most of the time. Some relief schemes are built on greed and filth. Just look at USaid!! Closer to home, look at the giant retailers!!! We need to understand how each country is built first before we offer "tried and tested" solutions. Two industries keep a country going: farming and manufacturing. Stop outsourcing the manufacturing to the Chinese. Build factories here at home. Empower the citizens through transfer of skills!!! Enough said. Loathed the book! Sachs is an imperialist and snotty!!

6/10

“Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.”

Sachs transforms an overwhelming discontentment with the state of international aid to impoverished nations into several policy recommendations. The issue then, is that these recommendations are more anecdotal than concrete.

Sachs does however, hate the IMF and the World Bank, so I tend to look favorably on him. Heis reasons for his dislike and distrust of the IMF are simple, their policies are largely set by what is best for international banks, not developing countries, causing them to give predatory loans that only benefit the banks, rather than the nations they claim to help. This manifests itself in high interest loans with incredible stipulations given to governments without the infrastructure to implement them.

Sachs similarly spends much time on his borrowed concept of geographic position, which he believes explains much of the world economic order. The Revenge of Geography by Robert Kaplan is a much better book on this subject should you be interested.

I will say that in his favor, Sachs, wrote a plan for Poland to transition from a command to a free market economy overnight. That's no small feat, especially considering Poland is doing alright. My main concern then is that much of this is fluff, rather than realistic, hard policy, and Sachs has too high an opinion of himself. Other than that it's a decent book.

Even after finishing the book and leaving it for about six months resting in my bedside table waiting to be finally be shelved as read, I think that this book has aged in the same fashion wine ages in an oak cask. While some, if not most, of the data that serve as the foundation for Mr. Sachs arguments have fallen prey to the unfolding of events in the last 17 years since its original publication, I still find myself coming back for the awe-inspiring advice and fundamental insights that I consider now to be canon in development economics.

I particularly like how he stresses the need for a differential diagnosis in the field. Much like a doctor approaches any given illness by analyzing its root causes and symptoms, practitioners should consider why some countries fail to achieve economic development and delve deeply into the mechanisms that perpetuate the vicious cycle of poverty.

I may not be an economist, but I do believe that his appreciations over the impact that lack of good governance and the deleterious effect of corruption are lacking and require further analysis. He also tends to overstate the importance of aid from rich western countries, elevating in the international development architecture their demeanor as saviors for the poor south.

Notwithstanding these small shortcomings, I think this is a must read for all the development enthusiasts out there.

Foreword by Bono tells you all you need to know.

Common sense and autobiography rebranded as popular science. Summary of arguments:
Cancel 3rd world debt
Liberalise socialist countries to follow Western Market model
Wealthy countries should donate to poor countries to eradicate disease/ malnutrition/ poor infrastructure/ education to help end extreme poverty as set out by Millennium Development Goals

Sachs has a few good, very basic ideas. Mostly what I got from this book was that he agrees with me that paying so little (~0.2% of our GNP) in foreign aid, and tying it to so many requirements and paperwork, is false economy. Unfortunately, it's a very dull book. Most of it is spent detailing every little talk and piece of advice he's given, and naming every important or famous person he's ever met. What little conceptual work is tainted by A)his seething hatred for communism and B)a complete lack of sources. He doesn't cite a damn thing, his stats have no error bars or confidence intervals or anything of the sort, and he's so vicious about communism that I just didn't feel like I could rely on anything he said.

Jeffrey Sachs is one of the pre-eminent voices in economic development. I didn't give this book a 5-star rating only because it was sometimes pushing the political agenda too much for my taste. However, it is a fascinating book, rich in details and statistics, and even being 20+ years old is still relevant. While we haven't achieved the end of poverty yet (and Mr Sachs thought this would be possible to achieve by 2025) the world is making great progress and this book also unveils at least some of the tools at our disposal to eradicate deep poverty and its underlying causes.

Sachs visited Malawi a few times in the 2000s, and met the country's vice-president, "a remarkably fine individual, a dignified, eloquent, a popular figure in what is against all odds a multiparty democracy." He "came to know Malawi relatively well" and saw people dying of AIDS, depleted soil, no medicines in the hospital, children stunted from malnutrition. Paul Theroux visited the country in 2001; unlike Sachs, he speaks Chichewa, the Bantu language widely spoken in Malawi, having worked in what was then called Nyasaland in the 1960s. He read that "on the day the minister of finance announces his financial austerity plan, it is revealed that thirty-eight Mercedes Benzes have just been ordered from Germany," saw ruins of the shops formerly owned by the Indians expelled by dictator Hastings Banda, heard a British nurse complain that African doctors wouldn't work for what she and her doctor husband are paid, and saw his own novel Jungle Lovers, which is set in Malawi, on the index of prohibited books, alongside works by Orwell, Nabokov and Rushdie. Theroux is a novelist, and Sachs is an economist; a novelist would say that malnourished children by themselves do not make a good story, but malnourished children juxtaposed with the ban on Nabokov do; an economist would say that the index of prohibited books is irrelevant to the problem of soil depletion. Yet it seems to me that Sachs came to know Malawi not at all compared to Theroux. How well did Sachs come to know the other countries he advised on economic reform, most famously Russia?

Quick primer on development economics.