Book Review

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (New York: Penguin, 2005)

By Robert Reese

 

The issue of dependency in mission-related churches and organizations usually arises in settings where missionaries from wealthy nations minister the gospel in poorer nations.  Global poverty and the world economy therefore enter into the picture, but missionaries often have little understanding of global economics.  The End of Poverty is an important and understandable book on this subject.  Jeffrey Sachs is well qualified to interpret globalization since he has visited and worked in over a hundred nations representing 90 percent of the world’s population, analyzing and offering advice on national economies.  He was an economics professor at Harvard University and is now Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

 

Several of Sachs’s insights can help missionaries and others interested in the issue of dependency:

  1. Sachs distinguishes between three degrees of poverty:
    1. Extreme poverty, representing one sixth of the world population or one billion people, who literally fight for survival every day.
    2. Moderate poverty, representing 1.5 billion people, who live above the subsistence level but still struggle to make ends meet.
    3.  Relative poverty, representing 2.5 billion people, mostly in urban centers, who have access to housing, transportation, some education, and some nutrition.
  2. Sachs shows that the world economy has changed considerably since 1980, with over half the world experiencing economic progress in the past 25 years.  The numbers of extreme poor have fallen in East and South Asia, but have risen sharply in sub-Saharan Africa.
  3. When Sachs speaks of the possibility of ending poverty in this generation, he means that the main goal is to end extreme poverty by 2025 and the secondary goal is to ensure that all the poorer nations begin to make economic progress out of all forms of poverty.
  4. Sachs strongly criticizes the main institutions that have tried to rescue failing economies, namely, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.  He believes that these organizations have tended to represent the interests of creditor banks rather than the poor and so have often exacerbated the problem of global poverty.  He champions a new form of economics, “clinical economics,” that aims to improve the lot of the poor by scientific diagnosis of each nation’s economic problems.  He has had valuable experience in this field by helping nations such as Bolivia, Poland, Russia, China, and India to move out of economic chaos.
  5. Sachs also strongly criticizes the United States for focusing more on the military option to eradicate global terrorism than on the option of economic development in order to undermine some of the fundamental factors that breed terrorism.  He shows that the United States has consistently pledged more economic assistance than it has actually given.  He sets 0.7 percent of Gross National Product given in direct assistance from rich to poor nations as the target that can end extreme poverty, but the United States currently gives only 0.15 percent of GNP in such aid, far below all other wealthy nations.
  6. Sachs’s special interest now is sub-Saharan Africa, where extreme poverty continues to rise.  He downplays the standard argument that corruption and poor governance are the root causes of poverty there, and stresses instead that untreated diseases, like HIV/AIDS and malaria, climate change, and geographical factors play the major role.

How does Sachs propose to end extreme poverty by 2025?  On the one hand, he is refreshingly global in his perspective.  Because of his experience in the developing world, he sees the issue of poverty from the point of view of real impoverished people.  On the other hand, he remains captive to Enlightenment optimism, that money used wisely by rational benefactors will sort out the problem.  To his credit, Sachs admits that not all countries can be helped since some have no commitment to recognized standards of good governance and accountability.  He also realizes that the present aid situation is not sufficient, characterizing current practice as: “Many poor countries today pretend to reform while rich countries pretend to help them” (p. 266).

 

Sachs proposes that direct assistance from rich to poor countries should increase dramatically, but he specifies that the funds should be used in six categories of key investments:

  1. Human capital to improve health, nutrition, and skills.
  2. Business capital to improve technology in agriculture, industry, and services.
  3. Infrastructure to improve roads, power, sanitation, transportation, and communications.
  4. Natural capital to improve soils and ecology.
  5. Public institutional capital to improve legal, governmental, and police systems.
  6. Knowledge capital to improve scientific and technological expertise.

Furthermore, he emphasizes a clinical diagnosis by trained economists of what each nation actually needs to eradicate extreme poverty.  He sees the United Nations as the agency best placed to carry out such assessments as well as to co-ordinate aid.  He regrets that the United States has often opted to act unilaterally and has proved reluctant to invest significantly in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.  When the U.S. did invest heavily in the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the aftermath of World War II, its aid constituted more than 1 percent of Gross National Product, and the results were outstanding.  Sachs now calls on the U.S. to repeat this type of commitment, saying it is the best way to undermine global terrorism.  He claims that a 5 percent income tax on incomes over $200,000 will suffice to bring U.S. foreign direct assistance up to the level needed to support the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.  If all rich nations would set aside 0.7 percent of Gross National Product for the alleviation of global poverty, Sachs foresees the end of extreme poverty by 2025.

 

While Christians would certainly applaud the end of extreme poverty, some questions arise about the assumptions behind Sachs’s proposals.  All that he says sounds reasonable and his experience of correcting failed economies gives him great credibility, but in the end he seems to adopt unrealistic expectations based on his avowed Enlightenment worldview.  That is, he assumes that humans can achieve progress through their own wits and hence can create their own science-based utopia.  Therefore, he sees globalization only in positive terms, as long as it is what he calls “Enlightened Globalization,” or “capitalism with a human face.”  American culture was built on the Enlightenment, but it is only one possible worldview, and increasingly it is seen as a failed worldview.  The Enlightenment led the United States into unrealistic optimism about the possibilities of human achievement in the 19th Century, but that optimism was shattered by two world wars in the 20th Century fought among the supposedly “enlightened” nations.  Furthermore, the Enlightenment placed human reason in the place of God and relegated religion to the periphery.  Not surprisingly, Sachs disregards cultural differences and criticizes fundamentalist Christians as standing in the way of progress.  Paradoxically, he is a globalist who remains profoundly American in outlook.

 
What could this mean for the issue of dependency in Christian missions?  While reading The End of Poverty is deeply educational about the world economy, Sachs’s proposals for ending poverty may only exacerbate dependency.  This is because Americans reading his book may assume that all that they need to do is pump enough money into poorer nations using American ingenuity on how to spend it in order to help those nations.  Many western Christians have already adopted this strategy with regard to helping indigenous Christians and call it Christian missions even though it does not win the lost and incapacitates indigenous churches by making them dependent on outside resources.  Christians can learn a lot from Sachs, but in the end the Christian worldview is very different from his and our ultimate goals do not match his.  Money alone cannot end extreme poverty.info@wmausa.org -