The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.

Jeffrey Sachs 

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

Penguin Press, 2005. 416 pp. $28

How do we explain recent celebrity attention to the plight of the 1.1 billion human beings living in extreme poverty, people with less than $1 a day of purchasing power? Brad Pitt has spoken on television about the real possibilities for ending poverty in our time. Rock stars held concerts for the poor in conjunction with the G8 Summit. U2's Bono has become one of the world's leading advocates for debt relief and other anti-poverty efforts.

Part of the credit is due to Jeffrey Sachs and his best-selling book--to which Bono contributed the foreword. Sachs has become something of a rock star himself, the scholar-giant called upon to prescribe policy cures for ailing economies. It's a status he embraces throughout the book's nearly 400 pages--from his retelling of saving the Bolivian economy from runaway inflation to that of convincing Poland's Solidarity leaders to run for political office, or of his leadership of the UN's Millennium Project. Yet even if he overstates his role, few people have had or currently have more power in reducing worldwide destitution.

The sermon that Sachs preaches is one of the most important of our time. His own conversion--from a strict free-marketer to an advocate of harnessing the free market alongside well-targeted social programs and development assistance--sets a critical precedent for shifting economic priorities toward fighting poverty, and his recent leadership of the UN efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals is admirable and much needed.

The great neo-classical economist Alfred Marshall wrote that helping people live "a cultured life, free from the pains of poverty ... [gives] to economic studies their chief and their highest interest." In this spirit, The End of Poverty suggests two ends: the understanding of poverty as a proper and chief goal of economics, and the possible alleviation of poverty (at least in its absolute form) in our time.

Sachs states cogently that official assistance by the industrialized countries is crucial for making genuine and lasting economic development a reality for the roughly one in six human beings living on less than $1 a day. He documents in detail how for the last three decades, the developed countries have agreed to give at least 0.7 percent of their gross national product to official development assistance through the United Nations. Sachs calls upon developing nations, including the United States, to live up to these standing obligations. Like other notables in this area (Peter Singer, James Gustave Speth, and others), Sachs convincingly suggests that even if the industrialized countries were to go partway toward their commitments, they would have established the basic structure for wiping out absolute poverty.

Sachs sees one way out of poverty: "to climb the ladder of development." Although he places strong emphasis on freedom, he is adamant that there is no choice: Climb the only ladder there is. At the first rung is a low-paying (but not dead-end) job in a so-called sweatshop. The next step offers a service economy job followed by the initiation of small-scale entrepreneurship, and so on, up to highly skilled and highly compensated employment. The sooner impoverished people can step onto the ladder, Sachs says, the sooner they will be on their way out of destitution.

Sachs offers a sweeping account of the rise of the modern European economy as a model for all developing economies to follow. Although he recognizes the suffering caused by colonialism and imperialism, he offers no objection to the fact that countries benefiting from colonialism (the nations of Western Europe and North America) remain above the developing countries on this ladder, since more highly specialized inputs to the market always receive higher returns. Sachs seems to say this is a reality we all must accept. In such a view, even if Europeans and Americans stay on top as they climb from manufacturing to service to high-teach jobs, at least the developing countries have gotten off the ground.

It is all too easy to concur, knowing that living above the global poverty line beats absolute desperation. As long as economists see but a single ladder out of the morass of underdevelopment, this is the best that citizens of two-thirds world can hope for. But there is, in a Pauline phrase, a more excellent way. Well-being, on a national or individual scale, does not need to follow a single model of development. Being a part of the global economy does not require that all persons commit wholesale to a single path of development forged by the West.

Rather, individuals and societies must find their own voice and their own goods, many of which are dependent upon, but are not the same as, material or monetary means. This is why it's important to listen to arguments such as economist Amartya Sen's portrait of "human capabilities," which offer a rich understanding of development and freedom than Sach's broad-brush description can provide. Development is a multi-faceted, and not merely material, phenomenon.

Sachs urges his fellow economists to undertake "clinical economics" to alleviate poverty, diagnosing social ills and prescribing the medicines that address the particular symptoms of a particular economy (and society). Sachs likens himself to doctors who cure individual patients, though in his analogy the healer's art extends to national economies. Sachs concludes that if other economists would follow his lead and political leaders would respond, poverty could be a thing of the past.

This book offers a hopeful, well-stated "prescription" for reducing poverty. It is a good thing that someone as influential as Sachs recognizes poverty as a blight upon both individual lives and our collective human identity, and that he has dedicated significant effort to going beyond even the Millennium Development Goals. At the same time, it is clear that the critical--yet rarely celebrated--work of assisting impoverished people in their attempts to attain their own ends, and to exercise their own agency, will require a creative vision, one arguably less deterministic than Sachs offers, of the upward steps towards human development.