The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

India was where Sachs was first confronted with extreme poverty (as a graduate student in 1978). Along with the dedication one might expect from that personal history in a book titled The End of Poverty, the broader history of India also becomes relevant to the narrative. India, Sachs points out, has the distinction of being a historically great civilization that literally lost its sovereignty to a private corporation (the British East India Tea Company) in the 19th century.

The history of India, touched on only briefly by Sachs, is important in that it explains how a company of the much smaller British country managed to take over the large, diverse, and productive Indian population in a series of brutal tactics complete by 1858. Essentially, divisions in Indian society (such as those enforced by the strict caste system) created a weakness resulting from lack of internal social cohesion that enabled conquest. From there, the British had disdain for Indians obtaining significant education, for the development of industry in India, and for any sign of humanity toward the Indians. Thus, India suffered regular and devastating famine under British rule that killed many millions as the British refused to intervene, with the last such famine occurring in 1943. India gained independence in 1947, and no famine has occurred since. Thereafter, a series of choices that Sachs presents as reasonable but unhelpful severely limited India’s growth to under 2% per capita until the late 1960s.

Once India undertook market-promoting reforms by the early 1990s, however, it unleased an economic potential akin to that of China. India rapidly became a major player in the exploding information technology arena and, by the time of the book’s publication in 2005, India stood poised to replicate the broader and deeper growth of China in catching up for a long history of stymied economic progress.

While India stands out to Sachs for its lessons in international division of labor and for the fine-grained analysis suggested by its geography and population, the thrust of India’s future appears unquestionable. Along with China, Sachs expects India to “reshape global politics and society” in the 21st century (187), ending the period of Western dominance that began with the Industrial Revolution in England.

Finally, in Chapter 10 Sachs focuses on the seemingly intractable problem of extreme poverty in Africa. Unlike China and India, which have climbed aboard the ladder of economic development with a pent-up zeal likely to transform the world, Africa appears stuck in a preindustrial phase to which the term “economic development” seems to have no application. The chapter addresses why this is so and what, if anything, can be done about it.

Sachs is a firm optimist eager to attack such a morally righteous but practically difficult problem. Subsequent chapters more or less attempt to apply lessons learned in the economic development of other places to the ills of Africa. Differential diagnosis, however, suggests some additional considerations may warrant unique treatment, although Africa does not seem to be a “special case” to Sachs’s mind so much as simply among the last of the world’s regions to receive treatment in the form of meaningful economic support and assistance.

Africa has suffered nearly every form of misfortune and international cruelty known to humanity. This includes the slave trade, colonial brutality, and the damaging monetary policy of the 1980s and 1990s, but there is more to the matter. Africa’s disadvantages also include a nearly unique susceptibility to malaria based on evolution and mosquito species, with the result that the disease spreads in Africa at a rate roughly nine times the rate of transmission in India. This is no one’s fault, but it is not the end of the story.

The ripple effects of malaria on society are often tragic in and of themselves, not only through the dramatic reduction in life expectancy but also because of the reduced resources and education available to children in a region where a particularly high percentage of them are not expected to live to adulthood. Those who do survive lack the advantages that the meager income of the previous generation may have provided them if there was a reliable prospect of their survival. Moreover, malaria causes poverty through its effect on the population (including the probability of reduced intelligence for repeat victims, but mainly through social impacts). Poverty makes it nearly impossible to take even basic measures to reduce the spread of malaria. That is the poverty trap set by malaria.

But it is not only malaria. AIDS produces a similar problem. Upon studying the two diseases as they operate in Africa, Sachs explains that he was stunned and disgusted with the international monetary institutions’ responses. The IMF and World Bank promoted their involvement in development projects that contained minuscule engagement with problems like the African AIDS crisis, even though the cost of treatment would be a small drop in the budget of these institutions and the crisis would be aided phenomenally by their attention.

Thus, Sachs essentially introduces us to his current tasks, of which the book is both a part and a record. Sachs describes his involvement in creating a global AIDS fund, his push-back against international institutions, and similar projects ongoing or recently ended at the time of writing. He also establishes his deep concern and frustration at the difficulty others seem to have in considering evidence that supports the necessity of providing resources to bolster a developing market economy.