The
Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty by Nina
Munk ( Doubleday, 2013, 272 pages $26.96) is either an admiring look
at the hopes and aspirations Jeffrey Sachs has for his campaign to
end world poverty or a stunning denunciation of the hubris it
requires to think that the world can or wants to accomplish such an
ideal. Perhaps it is both. Jeffrey Sachs has always been the
smartest guy in the room. Early in his schooling he distinguished
himself in school both for his excellence in mathematics and his
ability to gain leadership positions because people liked and trusted
him. Growing up in Oak Park, MI, he was the son of a noted labor and
constitutional lawyer whom everyone thought would follow his father
to the University of Michigan and Law School there, and into
practice. Instead, his excellence in math led him to Harvard,
economics, and becoming the youngest tenured professor at Harvard,
mentioned at age 28 in the same breath with Lawrence Summers and Paul
Krugman. The New York Times called him “probably the most
important economist in the world.” Early in his career, Sachs
engineered the economic turnarounds in Bolivia and Poland, but was
unable to gain the cooperation of Russia to make similar changes
there. His politics were conservative and his economics large,
all-encompassing.
In 2001, Sachs was author of a World
Health Organization report called Macroeconomics
and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development which
apparently caused him to look critically at all the economic
assumptions about poverty and world health. He realized that the
economic theory under which he had previously functioned was
inadequate to the vastness of the task of improving health and
eliminating poverty in the third world. He altered his view of health
policy from a moral issue to an economic one. He reasoned that saving
lives makes money. The solution, therefore, to world poverty lay in
doubling our world-wide investment focused on its elimination. In
2002 he left Harvard to become the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable
Development at Columbia. His job he said, was to “be a pest.” He
saw himself as an emergency physician, a “clinical economist.”
Jeffrey Sachs
Sachs' goal has
always been to “take complex challenges and bring to bear expertise
in economics and other disciplines to find workable solutions.” A
strong technocrat and persuasive advocate, he believes that people
look at problems from a perspective of saying, “impossible,
impossible, impossible, impossible, obvious.” He needs to keep
pounding away at resistance until the impossible becomes inevitable.
An initial gift of $5 million dollars enabled Sachs to undertake
“extreme village makeover” and the Millenium Villages Project was
born in Africa. Determining to enlist private donors,
non-governmental organizations (NGO's), the United Nations, and
individual countries' foreign aid establishments to undertake a
gigantic effort to attack poverty and disease on all fronts, Sachs
became a whirlwind of activity supported by a technocratic
bureaucracy headquartered in N.Y. at Columbia.
Author
Nina Munk, apparently an old Africa hand, chooses to bring her story
to life by focusing on three African villages, in Somalia, Kenya, and
Uganda as well as three portraits of each program's director. Each
director emerges as smart, dedicated, educated, ambitious, and
overwhelmed by the factors making his job nearly impossible to
achieve. The Millennium Villages Project seeks to attack world
poverty by establishing demonstration projects to attack health care,
food supply, and education, struggling against the massive resistance
to change found in each of these areas along with the environmental
factors making the effort both necessary and seemingly impossible.
Providing water, establishing hospitals, providing the people and
equipment to staff them, changing age old farming practices, fighting
off the physical effects of poverty, and so much more in projects of
integrated effort emerges as a nearly impossible to achieve goal. And
yet, with Jeffrey Sachs' genius as a fund raiser, cheerleader, and
global-thinking leader, each project makes slow progress despite
smaller and smaller resources being made available. The picture Munk
paints of social and economic inertia, of people starving, dying, and
fighting is heart rending, and inevitable. Meanwhile, Sachs emerges
as a shrill, testy, driven, self-righteous, and difficult man. The
story of the rise in hope and expectations, the disillusion which
emerges, as well as the government and personal corruption and graft
seen throughout the societies the Millennium Villages Project seeks
to effect can only be described as heart-breaking. In the face of
ignorance, violence, resistance, local politics, tribal thinking, and
more, there is no hope here, despite the well intentioned efforts of
the project directors and their staffs along with Sachs's
increasingly shrill and desperate hectoring. The portraits of the
Millennium Villages' local directors show smart, ambitious local
people who strive to overcome local prejudice, culture, and poverty
amidst poverty practically unimaginable to those who haven't been
there.
Nina Munk
Nina
Munk is a Canadian born American journalist who is a contributing
editor at Vanity Fair,
the author a three previous books and numerous prize winning article.
Her earlier book Fools Rush In
has been called the best book about the AOL – Time Warner debacle.
The
Idealist was inspired by an
article profiling Jeffrey Sachs for Vanity Fair
in 2007. She lives in New York City. The picture she paints of
Jeffrey Sachs presents a man deeply committed to the cause of ending
world poverty, and his own role in making it happen. He is linked to
rock star Bono and celebrity actress Angelina Jolie in his quest, and
has become celebrity advocate in his own right.
Jeffrey Sachs
The
Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty
by Nina Munk ( Doubleday, 2013, 272 pages $26.96) is a cautionary
tale about over reaching, hubris, unintended consequences, and the
difficulty of making real change happen and persist. Sachs comes to
be seen as a misguided master planner who simply cannot juggle all
the balls without too many of them dropping. Perhaps the task itself
is simply too large to be accomplished, but the reader must both
admire and be horrified by the enormity of the ambition and
difficulty of the task to win the battle against poverty and disease.
The
Idealist was provided to me
by the publisher through Edelweiss:
Above the Treeline. I read it on my Kindle.
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