| | |  | Workforce Development | Home » » The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time | | | | | | | Description: | | He has been cited by The New York Times Magazine as "probably the most important economist in the world" and by Time as "the world's best-known economist." He has advised an extraordinary range of world leaders and international institutions on the full range of issues related to creating economic success and reducing the world's poverty and misery. Now, at last, he draws on his entire twenty-five-year body of experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring big-picture vision of the keys to economic success in the world today and the steps that are necessary to achieve prosperity for all.
Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall. Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, he explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty. The groundwork laid, he explains his methods for arriving, like a clinical internist, at a holistic diagnosis of a country's situation and the options it faces. Rather than deliver a worldview to readers from on high, Sachs leads them along the learning path he himself followed, telling the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China, and Africa as a way to bring readers to a broad-based understanding of the array of issues countries can face and the way the issues interrelate. He concludes by drawing on everything he has learned to offer an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most frequently hold societies back. In the end, he leaves readers with an understanding, not of how daunting the world's problems are, but how solvable they are-and why making the effort is a matter both of moral obligation and strategic self-interest. A work of profound moral and intellectual vision that grows out of unprecedented real-world experience, The End of Poverty is a road map to a safer, more prosperous future for the world.
| | | Features: | |
• Paperback in colors of white, green and black.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Jeffrey Sachs | | Paperback:
| 416 pages | | Publisher:
| Penguin (Non-Classics) | | Publication Date:
| February 28, 2006 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0143036580 | | Product Length:
| 8.49 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.53 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.94 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.93 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.4 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.0 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.75 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 148 reviews |
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106 of 112 found the following review helpful:
The Economist as SaviorOct 23, 2005
By Omer Belsky
Jeffery Sachs' "The End of Poverty" is three books in one: First, it is an exploration of the world, focusing on economics but surveying wide array of topics regarding international relations and politics, and offers a portrait of the planet today. Second, it is a crash course in development economics. Finally, it is an impassioned plea for more western aid to poor countries particularly in Africa.
I know of no better book for understanding the current state of the world. In several brilliant
Chapters, Sachs takes us through the hyperinflation of Bolivia, the post Cold War transition to market economies in Poland, Russia, India and China, and the struggles for existence in Sub Saharan Africa. All these are put into context of International Relations, Economics and Politics, and personified through Sachs' description of his own role in these happenings. It's a tour de force.
The weaknesses here are the complete absence of the Middle East, and Sachs' all-too-human tendency to portray himself as the epicenter of the events he describes, convincing Polish politicians to accept responsibility, and leading the fight against hyper inflation in Bolivia. But his involvement has not necessarily been as influential or beneficial as he portrays it: Bolivia, at least, can hardly be called a success story; Even though Sachs praises both its leaders and its policies, Bolivia is still not up to its 1980 level of GDP per Capita (p. 108).
As a primer on development economics, "The End of Poverty" is a more of a mixed bag. At best, it offers powerful insights, particularly about the importance of Geography to economic development. Although the case has been made before (most famously by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies but also by David Landes and others), Sachs really drives the point home about how close a relationship exists between geography and economic possibilities. Possibly he overstates the case somewhat - based on their geography, Egypt and Panama should have been economic empires - but Sachs truly has opened my eyes to a dimension in the question of economic development which I had barely considered before.
Africa is the chief victim of its geography, Sachs argues. In his view, the solution to Africa's problems is not really economic - it is not a matter of right monetary and fiscal policies but of hospital beds, malaria nets and AIDS treatments - readily available technocratic solutions which are missing for lack of funds only.
On the other hand, some of the chapters of theory are painful to read, particularly the one in which Sachs compares development economics to emergency medicine. His history of the world economy from time immemorial to the present is pedestrian and hardly innovative (it owes much to David Landes' superior The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor . Like Landes, it also owes much to Adam Smith - he is quoted in virtually every chapter of Sachs' book). But development theory - as opposed to technocratic solutions - is ridiculously over simplified (in Sachs' view, it boils down to two words - "foreign aid" pp. 247-250), as William Easterly points out in his review [...]- it's false to think that we know all the answers, and that the UN and other aid agency are sufficiently efficient to carry out the solution even if we had known them. For development economics, Easterly's own The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics is a must read.
As an advocate, Sachs's chief cause is persuading Western governments, and particularly the US, to live up to their obligation of spending 0.7 percent of each nation's GDP on aid. Sachs is an enthusiastic advocate of the Millenium Development Goals - a UN program to half poverty by 2015 - and of UN secretary general Kofi Annan (whom he calls "the world's finest stayrsman" p. 205. For a more balanced - although still highly favourable - view of Annan, see The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power).
Sachs effectively promotes his development goals from challenges left and right; Sachs points out that African Governments are no more corrupt then other governments (pp. 312-314); that "economic freedom" does not guarantee economic growth (p.320), and that reducing Infant Mortality rates coincides with a reduction in birth rates (pp. 324-325). I was also shocked to realize how little the US spends on foreign Aid (I knew it was little, but I didn't know it proportionally less than any Western country save Italy, p. 302) and that the 400 richest Americans are 20% richer than the one hundred and sixty one million, three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda (p. 305). Sachs convincingly argues that America often finds itself militarily involved in economically collapsing states (whether Vietnam, Lebanon, Zaire or Bosnia Herzegovina), and that indeed almost every country in which the US had to intervene suffered "state failure" (p.334). Wouldn't it be better to spend more on preventive medicine instead of risking American troops in the battlefield?
From the left, although Sachs identifies with the motives of the "Seattle Movement", he disagrees with their policy recommendations, calling for more - not less - trade, and for a large role for Multi National Corporations in reducing poverty.
Yet Sachs offers little place for dissenting views? Is the UN really this effective an instrument for poverty reduction? Is money spent in Africa really solving problems? To date, no country has been lifted from poverty via the large scale government sponsored policies Sachs promotes - instead, they have developed through mostly their own efforts with limited amounts of outside help. Africa does need more foreign aid - but maybe it needs more foreign humility, too.
142 of 157 found the following review helpful:
 One Harvard professor's attempt to solve povertyAug 20, 2005
By Peter Lorenzi
A wonderful thesis. The initial tone and first-hand accounts and analyses (Chapters 1-4) are great. Sachs' first few chapters read like Thomas Friedman, only Sachs publishes in journals and Friedman publishes in the New York Times. And Friedman has a few best sellers. Sachs is a very smart, accomplished, compassionate economist.
Sachs tries to provide some context. He seems to have personally saved first Bolivia (Chapter 5), then Poland (Chapter 6), then Russia (Chapter 7), then China (Chapter 8), and then India (Chapter 9), not from poverty, but from the mistakes of (American) foreign policy, greedy bankers, and the IMF. He always seems to get it right and they're wrong. He decries their solutions in favor of his own: demand debt forgiveness.
Then Sachs shifts into using his economic, statistical, and networking skills to propose solutions to eradicate poverty. His fundamental argument is that the rich countries need to give more money to the poor countries, and he seems pretty angry about the lack of compassion, especially from the United States, for the world's poor. Perhaps Sachs could start with his home institution, Harvard. This university has an almost egregious endowment in excess of $22 billion, pays its top fund manager $50 million a year, and employs Andrei Shleifer who "was discovered by the U.S. government to be making personal investments in Russia at the same time that he was on a U.S. government contract to advise the Russian leadership on privatization." (p. 144) This privatization effort, as Sachs reports, sold $100 billion in assets for $1 billion. Sachs thinks that we should then forgive the Russian government its debts. Rather than forgive debt, why not transfer some of that $100 billion to the creditors and not to political cronies favored by the government?
Look at China. Sachs commends their two thousand years of "a workable model of political organization" and their "remarkably little internal violence," only to show how China spent the last thousand years watching its GDP decline from 120% to 5% of western European GDP and employing policies, even recently, where "tens of millions of deaths resulted." Starving tens if not hundreds of millions of your own people is internal violence. Wiping out 95% of your GDP advantage is hardly a "workable model". And now, after a thousand years of self-imposed misery, China has climbed back from 5% to 10% of western European per capita GDP and their economic development is seen as a triumph. And Sachs laments how under British rule Indian GDP per capital grew at a 0.2% rate from 1870 to independence in 1947; compared to China's self-managed decline, British rule might be commended.
Sachs disdains the "money down the drain" argument (p. 310) against foreign aid, an argument that trillions have already been given, but counters it with an annual per capita expenditure calculation that doesn't counter the "money down the drain" argument. He describes Hernando DeSoto's "Mystery of capitalism" argument for deeds and titles to land for the poor as " a single factor ... to explain single-handedly the failures of development." (p. 321) Yes, economic development is more complicated than that, but isn't this a better, enduring, sustainable start than the "mystery" of one-time debt forgiveness? And DeSoto focuses on what Sachs ignores: self-help, or micro enterprises, as a grass roots alternative to repeated, well-intentioned but top heavy governmental interventions.
Sachs cites a study (pp. 322-23) that concludes that African men have fewer sex partners than men in Brazil and Thailand, to show that morals are not the cause of African AIDS, citing migrant workers and the lack of circumcision as possible explanations, but he does not seem to want to assign a root cause for the widespread prevalence of AIDS in Africa, moral or migratory. But the best cure for AIDS is prevention, not cheap AIDS drugs or foreign aid. And what does he think causes AIDS to spread in Africa? Dirty needles? Tattoo parlors? I once asked a Marshall Scholar applicant if she would consider adding an abstinence argument to her condom distribution AIDS prevention program in Central America. She declined, saying that she would not want to impose her morals on the people. It is a matter of biology, not morality, but sometimes moral admonitions can solve biological problems. People need information more than money, prevention more than drug treatments.
Sachs lauds the west, especially Britain, for acting against its own self-interest to abolish the slave trade (pp. 361-62) but fails to note the presence of slavery in Africa and Asia today. He wants to "rescue the IMF" (p. 366), the same organization that for most of the book he sees as unfit to deal with the debt crisis (see John Perkins' "Confessions of an economic hit man"), but he offers no rescue plan. He concludes by trying to dispel other "myths" (Chapter 16) and offering three pages (pp. 365-67) of argumentative platitudes, e.g., "redeem" the United States, which he claims is the world's "most feared and divisive country."
But all is not lost. The Institute for International Economics has reported that world poverty fell from 44% of the global population in 1980 to 13% in 2000, its fastest decline in history. This result indicates that the United Nations main Millennium Development Goal (p. 211) -- reducing world poverty below 15 percent -- has already been met. Another Harvard professor, David Landes, provides a more thorough historical context and explanation in "The wealth and poverty of nations," including the effects of culture, climate, and tropical diseases on poverty. C. K. Prahalad's "The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" shows how basic business and marketing practices are lifting people out of poverty more than any government, NGO, or debt-forgiveness program. "The new heroes," from the recent PBS series, funded in part by a foundation started by the founder of eBay, shows micro enterprises that work. Sachs shows that Hillary Clinton's take on the African proverb, "It takes a village," doesn't seem to be working in African villages. I really wanted to love and recommend this book. A telling sign might have been when Sachs describes Kofi Annan as "the world's finest statesman." (p. 205) Rather than just give poor countries fish (or recommend that poor countries tear up their bills for their fish), rich countries ought to teach people how to raise a diverse, sustainable economy.
62 of 66 found the following review helpful:
Much to offer (even if you don't believe in Sachs's plan to end poverty)Mar 03, 2006
By Magic Man
Sachs covers a lot of ground: a bit of world economic history, a bit of travelogue, moral arguments for foreign aid, and ... The Plan (to end world poverty by 2025).
The Plan itself, while mostly fascinating to read (with patches of exhausting technical detail), has its challenges. The biggest problem is that, while the investments he outlines will theoretically jump-start growth, it has never been tested, and the West has a long history of failed development ideas. Among other more technical points, Sachs either underestimates the inefficiencies in the aid agencies and in governments, or he overestimates the ease of overcoming them.
But the plan (and how to pay for it) makes up only four out of eighteen chapters. Here is what else awaits you: a brief economic history of the world and characterization of the rich-poor divides in the world today (chapters 1 and 2), a primer on growth economics (chapter 3), Sachs's prescription for how development economics should be practiced (chapter 4), tales of Sachs's very high level consulting in Bolivia, Poland, and Russia (chapters 5 through 7), economic histories of India and China (chapters 8 and 9), an overview of the economic and health situation in Africa (chapter 10), Sachs's views on how the West should respond to terrorism (chapter 11), The Plan (and how to pay for it (chapters 12 through 15), dispelling myths about why aid doesn't work (chapter 16), and the pep talk (chapters 17 and 18). The book can largely be read piecemeal. I particularly enjoyed chapters 1, 5 through 9, and 16.
One wearisome feature is the self-promotion. Sachs is the center of everything good that happens in this book. He has only praise for organizations he still works with (the UN and Columbia University's Earth Institute) but ample criticism for others (the World Bank, Western governments).
For more in this field, William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth gives an excellent account of trends in development aid for Africa and why they haven't worked. Robert Klitgaard's Tropical Gangsters is an entertaining and insightful memoir of a World Bank economist advising in Sub-Saharan Africa.
38 of 41 found the following review helpful:
Take with a couple grains of saltNov 04, 2006
By Blair
Like a lot of college students, I read "The End of Poverty" in a comfortable coffeeshop in America and thought it sounded pretty neat. I was an economics major, with a specialty in developmental econ, and Professor Sachs's idea of "clinical economics" really struck a chord with me. After all, as Sachs says, "it's up to us" to end global poverty, right?
Well, not really. See, since I sat in that coffeehouse and read "End of Poverty," I've served in the Peace Corps in Central Africa, done a lot more reading and actually gotten to work with officials from most of the aid agencies (governmental and non-) that Sachs talks about in this book. And I've come to realize that Professor Sachs's central idea in this book - what Professor William Easterly calls the next "Big New Plan" - is probably fatally flawed. It's flawed not because Prof. Sachs's research isn't top-notch - it mostly is, with some exceptions - but because it rests on two very weak assumptions. The first is that rich countries will ever "solve" poverty in the Third World through big, top-down programs designed and funded by Western planners. That is patently false. The second is that corruption isn't actually that big a problem. Also, way off the mark.
We in the West would really like to think that it will only take the right combinations of (our) policies and (our) funds to "lift up" the rest of the world out of poverty. But this simply isn't the case. Obviously, aid has an important role to play. But until many third world governments - yeah, I'm looking directly at you, Afica - get serious about governing, and not just enriching the local venal coterie of government sycophants at the expense of Western taxpayers, "international development" will amount to little more than an elaborate charade played out for the benefit of well-meaning Westerners who inexplicably keep sending their money to the Third World despite precious few tangible results. (And I'm afraid that many of the old hands in most of the major development organizations agree, when they speak candidly.)
Again, Prof. Sachs is a smart guy with an important perspective. But if you're looking for a more real-world approach to solutions for modern international development schemes, I highly suggest Robert Calderisi's "The Trouble with Africa" and/or William Easterly's "The White Man's Burden."
146 of 170 found the following review helpful:
Powerful overview of the many in deep need in the worldApr 17, 2005
By Michael Erisman
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. I felt, both intellectually and emotionally, the desire to help. So in that sense Jeffrey Sachs has made his case.
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. (Page 73). Several chapters go in depth into the economies of China, Russia, India and other developing countries. I found these sections to be solidly researched and well presented.
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.
There are a few sections where he loses his train of thought and attacks American politics; this weakens his overall prose in my opinion. If we are to truly commit to solve "world hunger" this will need to be a bi-partisan effort. Emotional attacks on one party will not move this forward.
The only real weakness of this book is what it doesn't say. Jeffrey ascribes all root causes and solutions to a government effort. In seems impossible in a nearly 400 page book on poverty, to not address materialism, greed, and the culture of valuing self above all else. Yet no where does he address personal responsibility. The fact that the efficiency of non-governmental charitable work through organizations like "World Vision" vastly outperforms any government processes is ignored here. The book is poorer for the lack of addressing personal accountability for each of us to care for the poor in our world community.
I recommend this book despite these gaps. There are many who suffer needlessly in our world while we sit in comfort. The book does contain some great insights into the systems that may help reduce or stop the cycle of poverty and the resulting tragic consequences to children and families. The book is written very well, topics are laid out clearly, and the research is first rate.
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