Jeffrey Sachs - The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime

How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University as well as Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. He is internationally renowned for his work as economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa.

FOR SONIA
Life partner, inspiration, teacher, best friend

Two men asleep beside each other on a long journey into Africa, literally and thankfully above the thunderclouds. One is fairly clean shaven, papers strewn around him. Matte black suit, eyes slightly hollowed from no sleep, thoughts too big even for his big head. The other is a more bohemian mess. Unshaven, unkempt, he cant just have been up for days, his boyish face says years. An advertisement for why air miles can be bad for your health. When he wakes, an air hostess asks for his autograph. Confused and amused, he points to the geek in the black suit lying among the papers. Thats me. Let me introduce myself. My name is Bono and I am the rock star student. The man with me is Jeffrey D. Sachs, the great economist, and for a few years now my professor. In time, his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine.

Let me tell you how we started this journey. It goes back to before Jeff Sachs had become director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Before he moved to New York to become UN Secretary-General Kofi Annans special adviser. It goes back to when Jeff gave me the third degree from the Kennedy School of International Development at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My great friend Bobby Shriver had advised me to meet him in order to know what I was talking about before I went up to Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of Jubilee 2000 for the cancellation of the LDCs (least developed countries) debt to the rich countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) as part of the millennium celebrations. I would enter the world of acronyms with a man who can make alphabet soup out of them. Soup youd want to eat. Soup that would, if ingested properly, enable a lot more soup to be eaten by a lot more people.

Hunger, disease, the waste of lives that is extreme poverty are an affront to all of us. To Jeff its a difficult but solvable equation. An equation that crosses human with financial capital, the strategic goals of the rich world with a new kind of planning in the poor world.

Im a singer with an ear for a melody. Great ideas have a lot in common with a great melody. A certain clarity, inevitability, memorability. you cant get them out of your head, they nag at you. The ideas in this book are not exactly sing-a-long but they have a hook you wont forget: the end of poverty. Its a challenge thats hard to ignore.

Jeff is hard to ignore. At speaking events Ive had to walk on after this man (its like the Monkees going on after the Beatles). His voice is louder than any electric guitar, heavier than heavy metal. His passion is operatic, hes physically very present, animated. There is wildness to the rhetoric but a rigor to the logic. God may have given him a voice with an amplifier built in, but its the argument that carries the day.

Hes not just animated; hes angry. Because he knows that a lot of the crisis in the developing world can be avoided. Staring at people queuing up to die three to a bed, two on top and one underneath, in a hospital just outside of Lilongwe, Malawi, and knowing this doesnt have to be so is too much for most of us. I am crushed. He is creative. Hes an economist who can bring to life statistics that were, after all, lives in the first place. He can look up from the numbers and see faces through the spreadsheets, families like his own that stick together on treks to the far ends of the world. He helps us make sense of what senseless really means: fifteen thousand Africans dying each and every day of preventable, treatable diseasesAIDS, malaria, TBfor lack of drugs that we take for granted.

This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea many of us hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality. What is happening in Africa mocks our pieties, doubts our concern, and questions our commitment to that whole concept. Because if were honest, theres no way we could conclude that such mass death day after day would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. Certainly not in North America, or Europe, or Japan. An entire continent bursting into flames? Deep down, if we really accept that their livesAfrican livesare equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

This book is about the alternativetaking the next step in the journey of equality. Equality is a very big idea, connected to freedom, but an idea that doesnt come for free. If were serious, we have to be prepared to pay the price. Some people will say we cant afford to do it . I disagree. I think we cant afford not to do it. In a world where distance no longer determines who your neighbor is, paying the price for equality is not just heart, its smart. The destinies of the haves are intrinsically linked to the fates of the have-nothing-at-alls. If we didnt know this already, it became too clear on September 11, 2001. The perpetrators of 9/11 might have been wealthy Saudis, but it was in the collapsed, poverty-stricken state of Afghanistan that they found succor and sanctuary. Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.

The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty. Who said that? Not me. Not some beatnik peace group. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when a military man starts talking like that perhaps we should listen. In tense, nervous times isnt it cheaperand smarterto make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?

We wish things were different. But wishful thinking is not just unhelpful here; its dangerous. The plan Jeff lays out is not only his idea of a critical path to accomplish the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of cutting poverty by halfa goal signed up to by all the worlds governments. Its a handbook on how we could finish out the job. On how we could be the first generation to outlaw the kind of extreme, stupid poverty that sees a child die of hunger in a world of plenty, or of a disease preventable by a twenty-cent inoculation. We are the first generation that can afford it. The first generation that can unknot the whole tangle of bad trade, bad debt, and bad luck. The first generation that can end a corrupt relationship between the powerful and the weaker parts of the world which has been so wrong for so long.

In Jeffs hands, the millstone of opportunity around our necks becomes an adventure, something doable and achievable. His argument is clear. We converge from our different starting points he from markets, I from placards. Luckily we agree you need both. However, for all of the books cogency, you wont find an answer to the most important question of all. It falls outside regressions, theorems, field work and lands fairly, squarely on our shoulders. We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or diesbut