Category: end of poverty

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN by William Easterly


I’ve only just begun this one but I just had to give you an update. So far it’s very interesting, mostly it seems an attempt to discredit THE END OF POVERTY, which I blogged about earlier this year here. However, he makes some incredibly quaint statements, such as positing that markets are – get this – “the ideal vehicle for feedback and accountability”.

How charmingly pre-credit crunch! The sweetly naïve good old days of 2007. I am very much not noticing the jails overcrowded with AIG employees, or the unemployment queues full of traders from Goldman Sacs. Feedback. Ha ha. Accountability. Ha bloody ha.

THE END OF POVERTY by Jeffery Sachs


My title should perhaps also include: FOREWORD by Bono. Which, based on the cover, the publishers think is apparently as important a feature as the book itself. I didn’t bother with the it, though. Partly on principle. That principle being – Dude: how much contempt do the publishers have for us? They’re all like: these morons will be totally excited by two pages from a celebrity.

Anyway, Jeffery Sachs is a famous economist, who was given tenure at Harvard at 28 (a fact he is not at all embarrassed to highlight for us on about page 3). He believes, or claims to believe for the rhetorical joy of it, that poverty can be ended in our lifetime, and in this book attempts to explain how. Okay, I have to confess, I can’t tell you more about it right now, as I haven’t finished it yet. I took it camping with me, and it was all too much for me. I discovered, to my shame, that apparently I can’t live without fiction. Sweet, sweet, fiction. Which is how I ended up paying 12 euros for a piece of crap, which I did finish, in a shameful two days, which I’ll tell you about next.