Business Book Blog

Author: Jeffrey Sachs

Though this isn’t a book about running a business, it is definitely a book about what the ends of business should be. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, lays out a plan to eliminate serious poverty in the world by the year 2025. The basis of the plan is the level of ODA (Official Development Assistance) that developed country’s need to give to poorer countries. The book also chronicles more than 20 years of Sachs work with heads-of-state all over the world from his own perspective, which is what most piqued my interest to read it.

The End of Poverty has been accused by some as being “dangerously naive” and Sachs has a lot of critics in both the political and academic worlds, but it is compelling enough of a book and argument to warrant a look at. Oh and one more thing, Bono wrote the forward.

What The Washington Post says. One of the best lead paragraphs I have seen in a book review in a long time.

Jeffrey D. Sachs’s guided tour to the poorest regions of the Earth is enthralling and maddening at the same time — enthralling, because his eloquence and compassion make you care about some very desperate people; maddening, because he offers solutions that range all the way from practical to absurd. It’s a shame that Sachs’s prescriptions are unconvincing because he is resoundingly right about the tragedy of world poverty. As he puts it, newspapers should (but don’t) report every morning, “More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.”

What the Book’s own press release says.

“Extreme poverty can be ended, not in the time of our grandchildren, but our time.” Thus forecasts Jeffrey D. Sachs, whose twenty-five years of experience observing the world from many vantage points has helped him shed light on the most vital issues facing our planet: the causes of poverty, the role of rich-country policies, and the very real possibilities for a poverty-free future. Deemed “the most important economist in the world” by The New York Times Magazine and “the world’s best-known economist” by Time magazine, Sachs brings his considerable expertise to bear in the landmark The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, his highly anticipated blueprint for world-wide economic success — a goal, he argues, we can reach in a mere twenty years.

Posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 under General Business, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can also trackback from your own site.