Book review: The End of Poverty
by Julie Bryce
Author: Jeffrey D.Sachs
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publication date: October 1, 2006
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/
Last weekend I finished reading this book and watched Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, all in the span of 24 hours. Thoughts of global warming, the threat of a permanently altered planet, and extreme poverty killing thousands every day were swimming in my mind. While I felt a sense of urgency, I also felt conflicted. Because it’s hard to feel urgent about both. In fact, history shows it’s hard for the US government to give urgent attention to more than one crisis at a time. So what to do in the face of such cultural monsters?
Interestingly, and perhaps the deeper cause of turmoil, author Jeff Sachs lauds the industry that the film Inconvenient Truth condemns for polluting our planet. And I fear they’re both right. Industrialization and widespread globalization are contributing to global warming, especially as previously agrarian laborers move to cities and create more epicenters of activity. Working in more skilled jobs (industries that are often culprits of polluting), these laborers eventually purchase cars and add to the carbon dioxide the human race collectively emits. And yet, this is a success story. A human being has climbed out of extreme poverty and, as their children grow, and their grandchildren are born, the generations that follow him will enter the world on a higher rung of the the socioeconomic ladder. Further removed from the extreme poverty that afflicted their ancestors.
In fact, a ladder is the analogy Sachs uses most to describe extreme poverty and its escape. He explains that people living in extreme poverty can’t grasp even the bottom rung of the ladder. They don’t have the basic necessities to sustain life: food, clean water, shelter. Without basic sustenance, it’s impossible to pursue education or consider means of income beyond than subsistence agriculture.
Sachs cites Malawi as an example of the “the perfect storm” of extreme poverty. All of these characteristics culminate, compounded by AIDS and Malaria epidemics, into a “horrific maelstrom.” And unfortunately, “the world community has so far displayed a fair bit of hand-wringing and even some high-minded rhetoric, but precious little help.”
“Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive.” Sachs gives us the newspaper headline that we will probably never see: More than 20,000 people died yesterday because they couldn’t afford the basic necessities required for human life.
The situation Sachs addresses in The End of Poverty is a tragedy that’s occurring as I write this review. It was a crisis when I got up this morning. And as you poured your coffee in whatever corner of the world you’re reading this, people were dying of hunger, thirst, and disease. By the thousands, every day. This is not an impending crisis; we’re in the climax. Though a grave problem and one of great consequence, global warming is still mounting. Nature is showing the effects, and scientists are predicting the consequences that will be felt by the human race in as little as ten years. This is not a trivial matter or one to be minimized. But if the United States is to mount an immediate offense against one crisis or the other, I think millions dying senseless deaths takes precedent.
Is there hope? Sure. If Macroeconomics 101 put you to sleep in college, give Sachs a second chance to teach you some basic economics. Does the name John Maynard Keynes ring a bell? Keynes wrote around the time of the Great Depression and fathered Keynesian theory, which asserts that both the state and private enterprise play important roles in developing a healthy economy fit for long-term growth. Important for Sachs is Keynes’ emphasis on scientific and technological innovation as a means to long-term economics growth. He predicted this kind of growth even in the throws of the Great Depression in America. His predictions came true. Technological and scientific innovation has for the most part eradicated extreme poverty in America and the rest of the developed world. We’re not talking about computers or the Internet, either. Scientific and technological advancements as basic as paved roads, which allow goods and services to be traded freely and with ease, are impediments to economic stability and growth in underdeveloped nations in Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The remedy? Unfortunately there’s no one-size-fits-most panacea. Sachs emphasizes the importance of grassroots programs and small-scale initiatives tailored to specific needs and demographics. The rest of the world often imagines Africans as one ethnicity, facing similar challenges. When the truth is, more than a dozen countries make up Sub-Saharan Africa, an area widely-regarded as one of the most needy. It’s no surprise that small-scale operations aimed at specific countries, even specific towns or subsets of towns, are most effective.
And this is where open source comes in. Specialized aid efforts, targeted at specific regions, using the expertise and know-how of those involved. Now imagine all these how-tos and that information gathered by aid organizations is documented publicly, available for mass distribution. Even mass reproduction.
When knowledge is shared, and intricate mistakes and successes are made public, the world can take real steps toward the end of poverty.
July 30th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I just read a great novel called “Wearing the Spider” by Susan Schaab, perhaps you may find it n interesting read to review because of its’ cross-genre set up. The novel incorporates mystery with crime/suspense fiction as well as innocent romance.
July 30th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
This is the book that got me to work on the OLPC project. I even bought a second copy since I left my first copy at my parents house. Right now I am reading it while taking detailed notes. For instance the second paragraph in “The Cascade of Technological Change” section on page 41 of my edition can be applied as a description of why Open Source is such a great economic model:
July 30th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
“More than 20,000 people died yesterday because they couldn’t afford the basic necessities required for human life.”
I recommend David Korten’s “When Corporations Rule the World.” Korten spent much of his life aiding development in third-world countries. The above quoted sentence was often the result of development efforts, due to displacement, increased class divide, etc.
I’d agree with William Easterly’s assessment of Sachs’ theories. From Easterly’s article on “The End of Poverty”:
“The piecemeal reform approach (which his book opposes) would humbly acknowledge that nobody can fully grasp the complexity of the political, social, technological, ecological and economic systems that underlie poverty. It would eschew the arrogance that “we” know exactly how to fix “them.”"
The above seems like a good discription of the open-source process. Sachs’ approach towards world problem doesn’t seem like a very open-source process to me.
But Sachs’ writing, compassion, and passion are lovely examples of humanness.
July 31st, 2007 at 12:00 am
What makes you think that leaving an agricultural life for the city is a move “up” the “ladder”? You can be desperately poorer in the city even though you have more income, because it costs more to live.
The discussion above seems to be predicated on the notion that economic growth is good, i.e. that it’s an end in itself rather than the means to an end. This, more than any other notion, is what’s fucking our world today. It is the underlying assumption that kills more people than any other root cause. (Actually I was trying to think of some other causes, but they all seemed to come back to the belief in “more is better”, rather than “what is enough?”.)
I really, really dislike the assumption that we (the affluent) should “help” them (the poor) by making them like us. The King of Bhutan should be the king of Earth, IMHO.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:44 am
John Williams,
And what makes you think “they” as you put it are any different than us? The world is one ecosystem and while there will always be a struggle between cultural identity and globalization the thought that it has to be one or the other is ludicrous.
Lets put it this way, China was once a more technical and prosperous nation than the west. At some point in history they closed themselves off from the rest of the world and lost out on all the advances that was happening in the west due to free flow of information and relatively free trade happening in Europe. For awhile they were forced open and exploited by foreign entities. This was bad and no one is advocating dragging nations into world economics, or at least this is not what Sachs is proposing. What Sachs is proposing is more what is happening in modern China which is them coming to the economic ladder on their own terms. China’s year over year economic growth is staggering mostly due to their astounding uptake of technology. Is it a perfect picture? No. They are experiencing much of the same problems the west had to overcome during the industrial revolution.
As an aside on page 43 in the section titled “The Great Rupture” talks about why European dominance was bad for globalization and global stability. One of my favorite quotes is “economic dominance creates a misplaced belief in superiority”.
What Jeffery Sachs is proposing is providing aid to countries in order to remove the barriers for them to become self sufficient. These barriers include disease, lack of access to education, poverty traps, geography traps, and fiscal traps, among others.
His book title is a little misleading because what he is proposing is the end to Extreme poverty as outlined by the UN Millennium Goals. Poverty itself will take a bit longer as even the richest of nations have their poor. Extreme poverty is marked by those who have yet to reach even the bottom rung of the economic ladder by which they have a chance to pull themselves out of poverty.
August 1st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
The authors comment about having to choose between poverty and climate change strike me as sadly defeatist. Certainly, if developing nations are given the chance to learn now what it took western countries to learn through hundreds of years of industrialization, much of the damage could surely be avoided?
Implementing technologies such as carbon capture and renewable energy sources at an early stage of these countries development is important and achievable, I think.
Saying all that, I agree with John Williams: the notion of economic growth isn’t necessarily good. It seems to me (albeit a laymen) that the basis of economic growth is largely selling more and more goods to people, whether or not they really need them, and whether or not they really result in an increased quality of life. While I don’t know the answer to this, surely there’s another approach?
August 8th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Although not having read the book I get a sense of where it is coming from. Another idea that occured to me was that of maybe our economic system is in some way self defeating. That is as it strives endlessly to reduce cost by automating out human labor I see the increasing use of robots to become this source of labour. Now surely the ultimate cost of robotic labour is zero. (Robots build robots, from raw materials mined by robots etc ) So if we have an infinite source of free labour how could anything have a value. Ie if I had a robot that could build me a house from raw materials that another robot has delivered then where would the cost be… So we would see the ultimate end of poverty as there would be no cost in getting anything. Although robots might be pretty poverty stricken. Perhaps I should read that book now.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:16 am
In response to Julie Question what should I do I tell her to read another book
http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Global-Warming-Environmentalism/dp/1596985011/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104-7293893-5696752
Book review: The End of Poverty
by Julie Bryce
The End of Poverty
Author: Jeffrey D.Sachs
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publication date: October 1, 2006
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/
Last weekend I finished reading this book and watched Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, all in the span of 24 hours. Thoughts of global warming, the threat of a permanently altered planet, and extreme poverty killing thousands every day were swimming in my mind. While I felt a sense of urgency, I also felt conflicted. Because it’s hard to feel urgent about both. In fact, history shows it’s hard for the US government to give urgent attention to more than one crisis at a time. So what to do in the face of such cultural monsters?
» Read more
Filed under culture, review, education, design, One Laptop per Child on July 30th, 2007 | 7 comments »
August 8th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Jonathan Roberts,
It may sound defeatist, to say that we must choose between addressing the crisis of global warming and the crisis of extreme poverty, but I believe it’s a historically accurate deduction.
Look what’s transpired while we’ve been rooting out terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not meant as explicit criticism of the war, but a reminder that domestic healthcare and trade policy have suffered due to lack of attention.
My point is simply this. We must choose between the person that will die tomorrow, dying right, this very second even, and the people that *may* die 10-15 years from now…if no practical replacement for oil is discovered…and no mass measures are taken to scale down the emission of polutants.
Given the choice, I’d rather save the life today. Simply because: We have more time, technology and the incredible ingenuity of the human mind has more time, to solve the problem of global warming, before people die because of it.
November 28th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Mr. Williams, the author of comment 4. Please proceed to smack yourself multiple times in the head and then re-read the book. Jeffery Sachs intends for the affluent not to make the poor like them but for the affluent to stop sitting all high and mighty hogging money and share the wealth. Thus putting everyone in a better situation. We, the affluent, are living way beyond what is needed. We see something we want, not need, and we go and get it. The poor see what they want and need and can’t get to it not matter what the cost.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Those are two important causes. However, people should always come first. We can educate people on how to live a more green lifestyle in many simple ways. If everyone did a little bit of that, it can go a far way. However, there should not be a child dying every 3 second because of hunger related issues. The earth will always fix itself. It has throughout history of its existence. If we don’t do anything against poverty, this growing problem will only get worse!
June 8th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Think of it as evolution in action…survival of the strong, educated and hardworking. Only you can make your life what you want it to be it starts with education, but requires personal effort and determination. If you don’t want to work for what you want in life, you will not get it.
Along those same lines all this crap about global climate change is out there to confuse those who will not research the issue for themselves. Your lack of education is moving you to buy into the biggest scam of the century.
Global warming and cooling has been going on for hundreds and thousands of years. It is nothing new and Al Gore’s attempt to influence people with nothing more than liberal propaganda or an attempt to create a liberal political movement. The earth is currently at the top of the heat spike in our global temperature. It will start going back down in the future, any CO2 vs Temp chart will show you this quite clearly.
Quit believing everything you read…it is not your fault there are poor people…we did not start global warming…start thinking for yourself and quit letting greedy, corrupt politicians make you feel guilty for wanting the best for yourself.