I think the New Yorker review was pretty accurate. Sachs' The End of Poverty is laudable for its hopeful contention that poverty eradication is possible, and that the cost would be miniscule for the world's rich societies - even if it fails, it is surely worth a try.
Strangely, the tales of his struggle to end hyperinflation and currency instabilities in Latin America and the former-Soviet bloc seem almost boiler-plate and, dare one say, awfully similar to structural adjustment? To the different contexts of Bolivia, Poland, and Russia are offered almost identical lists of interventions - a currency stabilization fund, sudden elimination of price-controls, overnight liberalization of trade, and radical deregulation of the economy, all cushioned by social safety nets.
Sachs then launches into an exciting lecture on the anatomy of extreme poverty, followed by a grand scheme that identifies every area - the human, the natural, the infrastructural, the political, the technical - development assistance should address. He neatly places all of them into a flow-chart modeling a real economy; inject enough capital into each area, and they will click and churn into economic growth. "Voila." He ends, "With the same economic structure... but starting with twice the capital stock, the economy grows rather than declines." Of course, any of you who have ever taken intro development economics will recognize this argument. It's the "financing gap" thesis that was all the rage about 40 years ago. That version of economic development used a simple equation: plug a number for capital into it, and out comes a % of GDP growth. You want 10% growth? Well, plug it in at the other end, and the equation will tell you how much investment you need.
The areas of intervention he identifies also resemble the large number of frameworks development organizations have devised over the decades. A village lacks agricultural tools and imputs? Lets give these to them. Many of them get too sick to work? Lets build a clinic, train health workers, and bring in medicine. The knowledge and education is not there? Lets renovate the school building, train better teachers, import textbooks, and devise vocational training. Sachs' can-do attitude is admirable. Yet one should forgive any seasoned development aid worker for replying with anticipation: "so what's the new thing your plan was going to unveil?" Of the many things the development industry lacks, holistic thinking is not one of them. From CRS to Chemonics, most practitioners can tell you that "everything affects everything else;" that better schools can be inconsequential if the parents and kids are sick; that good infrastructure can remain little used if no economic opportunities exist anyway... etc.
These courageous men and women are disheartened by something different -- that the size and complexity of development may be beyond what we can comprehend and manage; that in a field of countless individual actors and projects, a majority of which impinge on each other's success, evaluation and accountability may be too tall an order; that there are always complications - be it political and ethnic agendas, local power struggles, unanticipated reactions to programs... etc. Aid targets almost always find a way to "game the system" - figuring out how to keep the aid money coming without having to make all the changes.
And what of the development "organization" as a problem in itself? Thomas Dichter has reminded us that the first goal of any organization is to ensure its own survival and perpetuation. If Sachs is the chamption of the hopeful, Dichter occupies the very other end of the spectrum, where development as a field has abjectly and resoundingly failed. He eloquently and alarmingly argues that NGOs and IGOs invariably come to define "success" somewhat differently from the well-being of those they purport to help. More often, mixed outcomes and outright failures become muddled in an effort to justify further donor funding - and organizations acquire PR/marketing arms to afford expertise to this process as if their names were GM and Starbucks. We are further shocked by stories of international consultants earning a fortune, of organizations consuming huge proportions of aid money as overheads.
Sachs takes note of little of these time-worn cautionary tales. His book reads like an aid worker journal from decades ago, when development was still fledgling, and when young professionals held riveting dreams of transforming the world wholesale.
To be fair, his plan does offer something different. But that novel element is at once inspirational and worrying, and for the same reason. To the pessimists he offers a solution: scale every thing up. Dramatically. Development has never worked as it should because donors were never serious enough. Aid in quantity and quality never surmounted that crippling halfheartedness. If the world were to simply become committed in unison, we can eradicate the scourge of extreme poverty forever. Yet the pessimists, and even realists, will worry. "What if scale was not even the biggest problem?" they may ask. Then our badly bungled development industry will become a very, very big, badly bungled development industry.
But is it worth a try? If it would cost me a Starbucks cappucino every week? Absolutely yes.
