Whiz kid.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin, 320 pp., $27.95)

ON U2's 1987 hit album The Joshua Tree, lead singer Bono belted out a powerful number in which he claimed, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." He didn't know it at the time, but apparently what the Irish rocker was seeking was a pasty-skinned and energetic development economist. The economist was then spending time shuttling between La Paz, Bolivia, and Cambridge, Mass., helping the Bolivian government try to put its economy on a path to stabilization and growth. That economist was Jeffrey Sachs.

Over the last two decades, Bono has deftly used his international fame and wealth to morph from a rock star into a development activist. He trots the globe, pestering heads of state to give more money to combat AIDS in Africa, jawing finance ministers to relieve Third World debt, and telling Larry King's audience how much more the U.S. can be doing to combat global poverty. The world of global-development activists is small, so Bono has come to work closely with Jeffrey Sachs on several projects.

During that same period, Sachs used his intelligence and ambition to morph from an obscure development economist into something of an academic rock star. In the foreword to Sachs's new book, The End of Poverty, Bono writes of a flight he took with Sachs when a star-struck stewardess asked the singer for his autograph. Pointing to the rumpled academic sitting next to him, Bono told the attendant, "The man with me is Jeffrey D. Sachs. In time, his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine." Time will tell; meanwhile, to determine whether Bono is on to something, we can turn to Sachs's book.

Sachs has devoted the last three decades to helping the poorest and most crisis-prone regions of the world. His tale takes him from Bolivia to Poland and Russia to China and India and, most recently, Africa. In most of these cases, Sachs is brought in by government officials to give them advice on how to get their economies on track.

In his travels, Sachs quickly discovered that excelling at Harvard--he was among the youngest tenured professors in the school's history--was not enough to facilitate economic growth or combat global poverty. Each country's case, as Sachs explains, is different; and each one requires a different set of policy prescriptions. Bolivia is landlocked, making economic development tricky. Poland and Russia were both emerging from Communist shackles. India's colonial history has made it mistrustful of globalization and trade. Africa's geography and disease problems keep it mired in poverty.

All his book learning wasn't cutting it in the real world, so Sachs was forced to think on his feet and react to the situations as he found them. Likening development economics to medicine, Sachs has coined a concept he calls "clinical economics." Countries are patients. Economists like Sachs are doctors and must diagnose what's wrong. Only then--and not from plush chairs at the IMF or World Bank--can they "prescribe a course of treatment." According to Sachs, in addition to a changed approach, ending poverty requires something else: money. Sachs says the developed world's governments and businesses need to embrace debt cancellation and combine that with increased spending on aid.

Sachs, it appears, wants to fight poverty the same way the liberal American teachers unions want to fix failing schools: institute smarter reforms ... and spend a lot more money. But Sachs doesn't style himself a defender of the status quo. He heaps scorn all across the political spectrum. He sees himself as trying to carve out the sensible middle ground that he believes has been abandoned by free-market enthusiasts and anti-globalization activists. And in this critique, he has much that's useful-and even surprisingly refreshing-to say.

For example, one bete noire of the antiglobalization Left is the use of sweatshop labor in Third World countries. But in a discussion of South Asia, Sachs writes that "the rich-world protesters ... should support increased numbers of such jobs [because] the sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty."

Sachs also believes the U.S. has nothing to fear from the outsourcing of jobs to countries like India. He says "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."

He also has harsh words for the antiglobalization activists who trash trade meetings and disrupt multilateral efforts to remove barriers to commerce and enterprise. What's more, he shies away from the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the antiglobalization Left and sees rich-world businesses as part of the solution to ending global poverty. "I have intersected repeatedly with the anti-globalization movement," Sachs writes, and while he admires their spirit and some of their efforts, "nonetheless I oppose many of the specific positions of anti-globalization leaders ... An anti-corporate animus lies at the core of the movement ... By now the anti-globalization movement should see that globalization, more than anything else, has reduced the numbers of extreme poor in India by 200 million and in China by 300 million since 1990."

It's not often that Ivy League academics confidently praise sweatshop labor and outsourcing, or critique the anti-corporate fervor of the Left, so when they do we know we're encountering something worthy of notice. Disappointingly, however, Sachs also resorts to some tropes commonly found on the left--because, in his heart of hearts, he is a utopian planner. He insists, for example, that the U.S. give more in global aid; but he never even considers the criticism of aid efforts from the likes of the late Lord Bauer and William Easterly, who have demonstrated that aid is frequently ineffective, or even makes matters worse by further entrenching the most parasitic elements of a poor country, its governing elites. Their criticisms are not philosophical, but empirically grounded; yet they do not command Sachs's attention.

What's more, Sachs is deeply critical of the American invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein-who is, among his other offenses, an objective promoter of poverty. Sachs also knocks the U.S. for not signing the Kyoto Protocol, even though that treaty would kill economic growth--which,

Sachs acknowledges elsewhere in the book, is required to raise extremely poor people out of their misery. Sachs is effusive in his praise for U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, whom he calls "the world's finest statesman." But Sachs fails to wrestle with legitimate American concerns over Annan's stewardship, such as his obliviousness to Saddam's oil-for-food machinations, and the U.N.'s bungling of the treatment of malaria and HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Sachs also underestimates the largest obstacles to eradicating extreme poverty: the political systems in the developing world that are making progress virtually impossible. He pooh-poohs the notions that "Africa is corrupt and riddled with authoritarianism" and that "corruption is the culprit" in keeping Africans mired in poverty. But what else is one to make of the regime of, say, Robert Mugabe, who has in short order transformed Zimbabwe into a humanitarian disaster? In the 1980s, when Sachs first began constructing his clinical economics, life expectancy in Zimbabwe was 56; today it is 33. Or consider that, according to a recent Brookings Institution/American Enterprise Institute joint study, several developing-country governments place significant taxes and tariffs on essential medicines and medical devices for their people. These governments are literally keeping life-saving treatments out of the hands of their people. Sachs is right to point out that the African people are not to blame for their poverty; but he too often fails to appreciate that their rulers do deserve much of the blame.

There is much to admire about Sachs, and much of what he writes makes sense. No one can doubt his passion for improving the lot of the world's poor. But while Bono may have found in Jeffrey Sachs what he's looking for, it's not clear that the developing world has found what it needs.

Mr. Schulz is editor of TechCentralStation.com.