"The end of poverty : How we can make it in our lifetime" -by Jeffrey Sachs

"In his 2005 work, The End of Poverty, Sachs wrote that "Africa's governance is poor because Africa is poor", reversing the usual assumption. According to Sachs, with the right policies, mass destitution - like the 1.1 billion extremely poor living on less than $1 a day - can be eliminated within 20 years. China and India serve as examples; China has lifted 300m people out of poverty in the last two decades. For Sachs a key element is raising aid from the $65bn level of 2002 to $195bn a year by 2015. Sachs emphasises the role of geography, with much of Africa suffering from being landlocked and disease-prone, but stresses that these problems once recognised can be overcome: disease (such as malaria) can be controlled, and infrastructure created. Without specifically addressing these issues, political elites will continue to focus on getting resource-based wealth out of the country as fast as possible, and investment and development remain mirages.
Sachs claims he has developed a new branch of economics, called "clinical economics."
Criticism
While a hero to some, many economists view Jeff Sachs’ proposals as dangerously naive. One of his strongest critics is New York University (NYU) Professor of Economics William Easterly who savaged End of Poverty in his review for the Washington Post.
Another person to criticize Sachs is Amir Attaran, who is a scientist and lawyer and currently the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development at the University of Ottawa. Sachs and Attaran have worked closely as colleagues, including to coauthor a famous study in The Lancet documenting the dearth of foreign aid money to fight HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, which led to the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, Sachs and Attaran part company in their opinion of the Millennium Development Goals, and Attaran argues in a paper published in PLoS Medicine and an editorial in the New York Times that the United Nations has misled by setting specific, but immeasurable, targets for the Millennium Development Goals (for example, to reduce maternal mortality or malaria). Sachs dismisses that view in a reply to PLoS Medicine by saying that only a handful of the Millennium Development Goals are immeasurable, but Attaran also replies citing the United Nations' own data analysis (which the UN subsequently blocked from public access) showing that progress on a very large majority of the Millennium Development Goals is never measured. Their ongoing debate on the web is one of the most fundamental in the future of international development.
Author Vandana Shiva in The Ecologist says about Sachs' novel: ".. there is a problem with Sachs' and so many of the other end-poverty prescriptions. Sachs doesn't understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. 'A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,' he writes, before adding: 'The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.' This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been 'left behind'; they are the ones who have been robbed. The riches accumulated by Europe are based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India's rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without Africa's slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have led to new riches for Europe or the US. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South..""
(An extract from the WIKIPEDIA)
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