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The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
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Sales rank 144,920
Customers rating (based on 134 reviews)
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Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling with concrete analysis, Jeffrey Sachs provides a conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall, explaining why wealth and poverty have diverged and evolved as they have and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty. Sachs plunges into the messy realities of economies, leading his readers through his work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China, and Africa, and concludes with an integrated set of solutions to the tangled economic, political, environmental, and social issues that most frequently hold societies back.
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| Publisher | Penguin Press | | Release date | 12/2005 | | Availability | Usually ships in 7 to 9 days | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $27.95 | | Our price | $18.45 (you save 33.99%) | | Used price | from $4.73 |
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It Takes A Global Village: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (@ Business Week)
The End of Poverty: In a world of plenty, 1 billion peo ple are so poor, their lives are in danger. How to change that for good
(@ Time Magazine)
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 very pleased
This book arrived quickly, securely wrapped, and in like-new condition. I couldn't be happier.
decent book
This book has an idea that is generally repeated over and over, send more aid to poverty stricken nations. That approach is interesting an cannot be disproved but for that matter it cannot be proven to work. Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion or Guns, Wars, and Votes are a more balanced approach to ending world poverty.
 slow.
The book was in fine condition, but it took over a month for them to ship it to me. I needed it for a class and was expecting it in about two weeks like the site said. The other two books I ordered at the same time came two weeks after the order, but this book took twice as long.
 Ugh...
Would have enjoyed this book LOTS more if Jeffrey Sachs could have throttled back just a bit on how he has personally saved the World (and how many calamities could have been prevented if the World had simply listened to him).
Ironically, his descriptions of why he is the World's Most Important Economist are actually examples of why his massive, generalized approach to poverty reduction are (unfortunately) doomed to failure.
Look, I appreciate the guy's motivations, but his world-view is, at best, unrealistically Utopian. At worst, he continues to promote an approach to development that has failed over and over and over and over gain and perpetuates poverty and dependency. He spends many pages describing the problems of the UN, World Bank, and IMF, and then recommends that every wealthy country significantly increase its contributions to those institutions. THIS time it will be different....
I want to go point by point to address his thesis, but it must suffice to say that the book utterly fails to connect his prescription for curing poverty (0.7 percent of GDP contributed from wealthy countries to poor ones) with actual results. The only accountability for results required by Sachs is whether donor countries have contributed enough, not whether the dollars that are being spent have actually addressed the issues of the poor.
Tedious, boorish, pompous. Sorry, but that's the book.
Somewhat informative, but too much naivety and hand-waving
I wanted to like this one--really, I did. Sachs starts off well with so much promise, but the book too quickly devolves into a turgid, complicated, and unconvincing advocacy for the UN's somewhat arbitrary Millennium Development Goals and massively increased foreign aid as the only One True Solution for extreme poverty. The book's useful content could be made more useful by distilling it down by three fourths.
Overall, while I agreed with him on many points, Sachs didn't convince me of anything I wasn't already in agreement with. I enjoyed his "modern economic history" in the first few chapters, his exploration of the varied causes of today's extreme poverty, and nuggets such as his contrast of the Chinese and Soviet economies. However, he rarely supported his claims convincingly, and often felt like I was getting only one side of a story. While I'm not opposed to massively increased foreign aid in principle, his plans are naive and overly simplified hand-waving solutions to incredibly intractable development problems
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