World poverty, Sachs says, can end, and we can help it happen.
"Probably the most important economist in the world" (NY Times), Jeffrey Sachs is Special Adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. He is nternationally renowned for his work as economic adviser to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa. In The End of Poverty Sachs draws on everything he has learned, explaining economics in a language we can all understand.
Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, The End of Poverty sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall. Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, Sachs explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty.
Rather than deliver a worldview to readers from on high, Sachs leads them along the learning path he himself followed, telling the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia and elsewhere as a way to bring readers to a broad-based understanding of the array of issues countries can face and the way the issues interrelate. He concludes with an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most frequently hold societies back.
The end? Sachs leaves readers with an understanding, not of how daunting the world's problems are, but how solvable they are-and why making the effort is a matter both of moral obligation and strategic self-interest. A work of profound moral and intellectual vision that grows out of unprecedented real-world experience, The End of Poverty is a road map to a safer, more prosperous future for the world.
