African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant

Over the last few weeks (and months) we’ve gone on a bit of an odyssey through Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty and found out how the man the New York Times calls “probably the world’s most important economist” believes that with carefully targeted interventions in health, education and agriculture, along with reform of governance and of trade rules, we could end extreme poverty by 2025. We’ve seen how he thinks it should be done, how it should be run, and how it should be paid for. Finally, let’s remind ourselves of why he believes we must take action - and how the obstacles of political inertia in the US can be overcome.

It’s in our interest

Like other advocates, including his friend Bono, Sachs points out that investing in eliminating poverty is an investment in security. “Hard evidence,” he argues, “has established strong linkages between extreme poverty abroad and threats to national security.” (p331) Economic failure leads to state collapse: genocide, civil war, revolution, with their attendant refugee and humanitarian crises. More influentially these days, failed states are likely to become a haven for drug traffickers, extremists and, yes, terrorists.

Sachs has a bad habit of saving his most impressive statistics till the very end of each point he makes, preceding them with a page or two of vagueness. He probably thinks it makes the book “accessible” and not, as Vanity Fair called it, “a dreary slog with only charts and graphs for company”. He does it again here, with some a-little-too-school-level talk about the economic roots of Communism and Fascism. Then, he cites a CIA study that identified infant mortality, economic openness and democracy as closely correlated to state failure. (p333) And given the US’ fondness for bombing or invading failed states, there does seem to be a strong case that a dollar spent ending poverty now is a dollar saved on fighter planes in fifty years’ time. Sachs lists 27 American military interventions since World War 2, of which only 2 didn’t come in the aftermath of some sort of state failure. (p334)

This idea isn’t news: Bush himself, Sachs notes, has expressed the link between poverty and the terrorist threat in speeches. (p335)

We promised!

This isn’t school, and saying you’d give someone your crisps at lunchtime because they carried one of your bags doesn’t mean you have to. But if you repeatedly, over a period of years, promise to give 0.7% of your money to the world’s poor, and then repeatedly fail to do so, you’re going to start losing credibility eventually. The US has committed itself to 0.7 in at least two international statements, in 1992 and 2002, but still officials often deny that major aid increases are part of the US’ development policy. “Spin as we might in the United States about our generosity,” Sachs intones, “the poor countries are fully aware of what we are not doing.” (p340)

How to sell it

Sachs has already noted that the public isn’t half as opposed to aid as pundits like to think. The success of the ONE campaign, with over 2 million Americans expressing support, suggests the issue of poverty in Africa is exercising the American public, especially churches. And recent and historical precedent shows how a political consensus for action can be built. The key, Sachs explains, is to have a series of giant rock concerts, and get Will Smith to click his fingers a lot.

Just kidding. Naw, the key is to get the people you’d expect to be against you on your side. When the US government needed to build support for its Marshall Plan for massive aid to Europe after World War 2, they involved the Republican opposition; recruited financial experts to approve the scheme; ensured the President consistently made the case for the Plan; and instituted a massive public information scheme to ensure the public understood the reasoning behind the plan. A similar co-ordinated leadership campaign now could ensure public support for a massive aid increase - and if the scheme was paid for primarily by the rich, as Sachs proposes, it would be even easier to get the public on board. (p341-2)

There is recent precedent. The Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt cancellation faced a wall of opposition from rich-country governments and the World Bank, and apathy from the public. But by convincing churches and influential figures on the religious right of the moral case for debt relief, the campaign won mainstream support and achieved impressive results in Congress. And similarly, the support of right-wing Senator Jesse Helms - won over by Bono’s prosyletising - proved vital in securing a huge increase in US funding for AIDS medicine in Africa.

A historic challenge

The End of Poverty begins with a dizzyingly birds-eye take on economic history, and it ends in similarly high-minded fashion. Action to end poverty, Sachs argues, sits within the framework of classic enlightenment thought, with precursors like:

• the democratic republicanism of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson;
• Adam Smith’s belief that capitalist economics could, if shaped correctly, push human progress forward to incredible extremes;
• the androgynously-monikered Marie-Jean-Antoine Condercet’s prediction that science and technology could achieve similar miracles; and
• Immanuel Kant’s call for systems of global cooperation to maintain and develop free trade between nations.

“It is our breathtaking opportunity,” Sachs explains, possibly foaming at the mouth a little, “to be able to advance the Enlightenment vision of Jefferson, Smith, Kant and Condorcet.” To help create political and economic systems that promote human well-being, and ensure the voice of the governed; to promote and spread science and technology worldwide, are quintessentially progressive ideas in the Enlightenment tradition. “Our generation’s work can be defined in Enlightenment terms.” (p351) Ending poverty, Sachs asserts, is nothing less than the next step in human development.

An enlightened globalisation

The more immediate context is globalisation. Sachs is surprisingly positive about the effects of the anti-globalisation movement that first came to attention in Seattle in 1999 with the protests outside the G8 meeting. “I applaud the overall movement,” Sachs explains, “for exposing the hypocrisies and glaring shortcomings of global governance and for ending years of self-congratulation by the rich and powerful. Before Seattle…. there was little said about the world’s poor.” (p355) However, Sachs is unquestionably pro-globalisation in principle. The antiglobalisation movement, he says, reminds him of the opposition of Indian academics to free trade during his visit there in the early 1990’s. “Those views were passé then,” he notes, “and are more so today. By now the antiglobalisation movement should see that globalisation, more than anything else, has reduced the numbers of extreme poor in India by two hundred million and in China by three hundred million since 1990.” (p355) Many of the movement’s criticisms of specific companies and their unscrupulous behaviour are valid, Sachs notes, are valid, but their more general rejection of capitalism and globalisation isn’t.

Instead, Sachs seeks ‘an enlightened globalisation,’

a globalisation that addresses the needs of the poorest of the poor, the global environment, and the spread of democracy. (p358)

Such a globalisation would mean supporting negotiations towards free trade, but also insist that governments would honour their commitments on aid and debt relief. It would also, Sachs argues, see the US return to a multilateral relationship with the world and end its “reveries of empire”. (p359)

Nine steps

Sachs concludes by outlining nine steps to building a world order that would amount to an enlightened globalisation, complete the enlightenment project, and mean free jelly beans for everyone on Tuesday afternoons. Probably.

1. Commit to ending poverty by 2025
2. Adopt a plan to meet the Millennium Development Goals
3. Enhance the voice of the poor in the international community
4. Bring the US back to the multilateral system
5. Restore the independence of the IMF and World Bank from undue rich-country influence
6. Strengthen the UN
7. Harness global science to address the needs of the poor, through public and philanthropic funding
8. Promote sustainable development
9. Make a personal commitment as individuals. “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” Sachs quotes Robert Kennedy. (p367-8)

Whether this all sounds like vague waffle, I don’t know. Coming at the end of 368 quite densely-packed pages of numbers, it seems kind of OK. If you want more of Sachs’ more general worldview, the place to go is his recent BBC Reith Lectures.

And that is, basically, it. It’s been a long ride. Soon, we will look at Sachs’ myriad critics, and how he counters their arguments. But before that, we will look at one more significant Sachs document: the UN Millennium Development Report. This is the full, nuts-and-bolts, packed-with-charts summary of exactly how the Sachs Plan would work, and it gives us an easy way to compress the World According To Sachs into a few short posts. Coming up. In the meantime, your thoughts on the Sachsism we’ve seen so far, and on The End of Poverty, are welcome below.

All page references are from the UK paperback edition of Sachs’ The End of Poverty.

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