In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs lays out a masterplan for eliminating extreme poverty within our lifetimes. This masterplan requires a commitment from three domains:

1) A commitment from rich nations to give more in official development assistance, and a commitment from superrich individuals to provide financial incentives for initiatives addressing the needs of the poor;

2) A commitment from governments in poor nations to create a plan to use foreign aid to bolster public health, education, and infrastructure, and to protect institutions that promote international cooperation;

3) A commitment from the rest of us to contribute to ending poverty within our own spheres of influence

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While most of the book is spent putting rich nations, especially the Unites States, on blast for not doing enough to help the poor escape poverty, in my view the most important takeaway is what it asks of us ordinary people.

What the book asks of us is to keep the faith. Ending extreme poverty is not quixotic, but a realistic goal with well-defined steps in order to achieve it. That other great book on ending poverty, Poor Economics by Banerjee and Duflo, also exhorts us to keep the faith. "Success is not as far away as we might think," the authors wrote.

Impatient yet analytical, exuberant yet cogent, The End of Poverty is an inspiring read.

A well written book. In my opinion it can not be read without also reading William Easterly's book "The Quest For Growth." The two scholors are at war with each other. Their debate is all the more interesting when you read the back and forth op-ed pieces they have written in the Washington Post.

I tend to agree with Easterly: Sachs means well, but he is very full of himself. His book is more a tribute to what he can do, and other economists can't than a good debate on the issues. Flying Bono around makes for nice PR but it doesn't address the serious economic issues/problems of international growth. Easterly takes a (in my opinion) less rigorous and more anecdotal approach, call it the softer side, to growth. He offers answers which everyone wants to hear, but which don't always bear fruit when fully analyzed.

Unfortunately, it is this fluffy side of growth that politicians like to promote. They promote it because its easy, because people like to think they are doing something, even if all they are doing is throwing money into a black whole.

Anyhow, this book makes for good reading, and I recommend it to everyone interested in economic growth, the hot topic of macroeconomic research these days. Just don't read it in isolation.

This book is not actually about ending poverty, really, it's about ending *extreme* poverty, which Sachs goes on at length to both define and clarify that's it's what he's *really* against. The bigger picture of ending poverty not only can wait, in Sachs' view, for the next generation, but will have to do without some fundamental rethinking of the way the world economic system works that he is seemingly unable to take the next step, once he runs up to the limits of capitalism. In general, skip this book and just go right to his favourite source, which is well worth reading: Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations".

Ending Poverty Model:
That isn't to say that his model of how to end extreme poverty model isn't useful, he's not only obviously done a lot of work to make it work -- it just makes sense for...one poverty area.
Once you apply it to ALL poverty areas the virtuous cycles get a lot more complicated. He doesn't make the really stupid mistakes that a lot of other naive altruists make but he definitely doesn't see the crisis of capitalism itself is blocking the route to his solution. This is a good first step, for the time in which he lived, and we certainly could have made more progress on ending extreme poverty than we made, instead of, say, bailing out the banks. But don't live under an illusion that this will be enough.

Who's fault it is you're getting poorer:
"If the rising tide is not lifting your boat, it is probably your own fault. The forces of globalization are sufficiently strong that everyone can benefit if they can just behave themselves"
I know this is said in passing, but it's still blaming the victim and part of the problem here.

China:
Sachs is only somewhat right. He's right that there's a lot of bouncing-back to do, but the future has shown him to not be quite correct that the centralized bureaucracy could not survive as far as it has, with no end in sight, into the 2010s. It was assumed that the centralized state would not adapt and become more dynamic, on the billion-person-scale. That seems to be part of what's happening. Or at least, he thought that it wouldn't be able to nerf dangerous changes, which the PRC seems to be doing. It also assumed, in the optimistic 'things could go well' stance the book in general takes(aided in part due to the fact that it was written pretty much on the eve of the beginning of the great depression...while the dotcom bubble wasn't that recent history, the economy was back on the upswing as of that point in history)...that China would develop to the US, and the US would not develop 'down' towards where China was so they could meet low, not high. Concurrently reading Donald Trump's Time to get Tough is illustrative: it makes a decent case that in addition to China catching up, the US really had by that point lost ground. Price your GDP in bitcoin and the numbers get really clear on that count.

Africa:
* There *are* things that correlate with economic growth, and eradication of extreme poverty. If you toy with some of them, you'll note that there's causitive relationships. That's what Sachs speaks of when he says 'differential analysis'---finding these relationships and exploiting them to increase growth/decrease extreme poverty.
* World Bank/IMF: Plenty of political pressure available to reduce healthcare spending and balance budget for minor balancing loans to further endebt countries...virtually nothing for AIDS/malaria circa 2008 for africa. Sounds familiar to Saskatchewan(where there are areas with AIDS that are higher than even african AIDS-affected countries), and in general, some of the lessons of extreme poverty and the differential analysis therein *do* apply at home.
* as of 2008, 90% of africa was *not* irrigated, ground not fed with nutrients. Huge agricultural gains still possible, even without cultivating virgin area.
* As Noam Chomsky has pointed out at least on a few occasions, if you've got a big bureaucracy that continues to fail at it's supposed role yet continues to be funded...you should start to suspect if the role you think it's filling is the role it's actually filling. If the World Bank "can't do their job" yet it continues doing so(p287)...you should start to think about why.
* The 'lack of modern values' bit is is worth reading and I might reproduce it elsewhere: it's basically a categorical review of the history of looking at other cultures with the eye to judging them based on how hard they work measured by how poor they aren't. A lesson from various parts of history worth learning from.

This reads like an autobiography, which seemed a little bit strange, but it is very impressive what Sachs has participated in and accomplished. I think the most interesting and may be poignant Takeaway was how often and consistently there exists prejudiced against those in poverty.