The End of Poverty
A landmark exploration of the way out of extreme poverty for the world's poorest citizensAmong the most eagerly anticipated books of any year, this landmark exploration of prosperity and poverty distills the life work of an economist Time calls one of the world's 100 most influential people. Sachs's aim is nothing less than to deliver a big picture of how societies emerge from poverty. To do so he takes readers in his footsteps, explaining his work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, while offering an integrated set of solutions for the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the poorest countries. Marrying passionate storytelling with rigorous analysis and a vision as pragmatic as it is fiercely moral, The End of Poverty is a truly indispensable work.
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What Hacker News says
- A book by Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, argues in favor of this approach where, wealthy individuals or nations help write off debt of poorer countries. The cost of servicing this debt is often crushing enough that no meaningful uplifit is possible from their current poverty.
- > Buffett is so vague that people are seeing in it whatever they want to see.
This is true. And anyway, here's a couple of things I see.
The first is a failed (or at least truncated) attempt at articulating the concept of Structural Violence[1]. I'm surprised he got so far as publishing this op-ed, without having been told to read anything by Paul Farmer. At least it appears he hasn't, even though Farmer is quite well-known. I know George Soros counts himself as a member of the Farmer school.
The second thing I see is Buffet slipping into the trap of armchair "big-picture" philosophizing. This is what Esther Duflo warned against in the very beginning of her poverty course on edx.org (she has also given a TED talk). Trying to make grand, blanket statements or generic judgements about aid as a whole, is a flawed exercise. Duflo holds up two books as the prime examples of this fallacy: The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, and White Man's Burden by Will Easterly.
Fixating on big-questions and big-answers clouds thinking and hampers action. Instead, Duflo teaches a clinical approach as infinitely more productive. Ask specific questions, conduct trials and collect data. Doing experiments and making observations is a much better way to discover truth than thinking your way through an extremely tangled web of armchair philosophizing.
- Seems most people have a trouble with the number and the report because it is from Oxfam? The UN came out with a similar number years ago (http://www.fao.org/Newsroom/en/news/2008/1000853/index.html) $30 billion to end world hunger. Other NGO:s (which I'm to lazy to google) have come out with other figures in the same ballpark over the years.
I.e if you yourself are not an expert on the global poverty problem then it takes more than "they are wrong" to refute their conclusions. The report is downloadable so just check the numbers yourself.
The references makes it clear that the original figure is $175 billion spread out over two years and is produced by economist Jeff Sachs. His book "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time" probably contains details on how it was calculated.
