PHA-Exchange> The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

[CLAUDIO at hcmc.netnam.vn]

 from "Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia (WDC)" <ruglucia at PAHO.ORG> -----

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
 

Jeffrey Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and
Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the
Millennium Development Goals - ISBN: 1594200459 -March 17, 2005 -
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

 
Website: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/index.html
<http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/index.html>  

 
"......Must the poor be with us always? Probably. But there are degrees
of have-notness, and, argues UN special advisor Sachs, "extreme poverty
can be ended not in the time of our grandchildren, but in our time."The
poor, even the one billion poorest of them, are not necessarily fated to
be so. In early modern times, much of the world lived at much the same
economic level, which explains why European explorers could have been
impressed by the sumptuousness of places such as Timbuktu and
Tenochtitlan. But after 1800, writes Sachs, "both population and per
capita income came unstuck, soaring at rates never before seen or even
imagined." 
 

The West outstripped the rest of the world over the space of the next
200 years, creating a vast gulf between rich and poor nations, the
product of uneven patterns of growth that have many causes. Some of them
are social and political; it is difficult, for instance, to foster
growth when corrupt officials skim the cream, ethnic hatreds mark one
group or another as outcast, and people reproduce too quickly. 

 
Some of them are also geographic; farming on exhausted soil and mining
tailings are recipes for disaster. ("Americans," Sachs exhorts, "forget
that they inherited a vast continent rich in natural resources.") Taking
issue with international-development economists concerned mostly with
capital and credit formation, Sachs urges an account of poverty that
takes a multifaceted view of the kinds of capital the poor lack (health,
nutrition, infrastructure, biodiversity, an impartial judiciary, access
to knowledge, and so forth). 
 

While agreeing with those economists that private initiatives are
generally more effective than state programs, Sachs also proposes
amany-pronged, needs-based attack on the worst extremes of poverty that
requires, yes, the rich to help the poor, but that is eminently
practical and minimally pipe-dreamy-and that, he notes in passing, would
help restore the reputation of the US and the usefulness of the UN in
the world. A solid, reasonable argument in which the dismal science
offers a brightening prospect for the world's poor.  Kirkus Reviews...."

 
[....If this is it, I am not sure I would agree with Kirkus. Anybody can 
review this for us for a second opinion?
Claudio]

            Modest Proposal Reviewed by William Easterly Sunday, March
13, 2005; Page BW03 - The Washington Post
            THE END OF POVERTY - Economic Possibilities for Our Time 

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25562-2005Mar10.html 

 
BOOK's Further Reading List:
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/reading.html
<http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/reading.html>  

 

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