The End of Poverty

Produktbeschreibung

The landmark exploration of economic prosperity and how the world can escape from extreme poverty for the world's poorest citizens, from one of the world's most renowned economists

Hailed by Time as one of the world's hundred most influential people, Jeffrey D. Sachs is renowned for his work around the globe advising economies in crisis. Now a classic of its genre, The End of Poverty distills more than thirty years of experience to offer a uniquely informed vision of the steps that can transform impoverished countries into prosperous ones. Marrying vivid storytelling with rigorous analysis, Sachs lays out a clear conceptual map of the world economy. Explaining his own work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, he offers an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the world's poorest countries.

Ten years after its initial publication, The End of Poverty remains an indispensible and influential work. In this 10th anniversary edition, Sachs presents an extensive new foreword assessing the progress of the past decade, the work that remains to be done, and how each of us can help. He also looks ahead across the next fifteen years to 2030, the United Nations' target date for ending extreme poverty, offering new insights and recommendations. 

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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"Jeffrey Sachs is that rare phenomenon: an academic economist famous for his
theories about why some countries are poor and others rich, and also famous for
his successful practical work in helping poor countries become richer. In this
long awaited, fascinating, clearly and movingly written book, he distills his
experience to propose answers to the hard choices now facing the world." ?Jared
Diamond, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse

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He has been cited by The New York Times Magazine as "probably the most important
economist in the world" and by Time as "the world's best-known economist." He
has advised an extraordinary range of world leaders and international
institutions on the full range of issues related to creating economic success
and reducing the world's poverty and misery. Now, at last, he draws on his
entire twenty-five-year body of experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring
big-picture vision of the keys to economic success in the world today and the
steps that are necessary to achieve prosperity for all.

Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs
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, he 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. The groundwork laid, he explains his methods for arriving, like a
clinical internist, at a holistic diagnosis of a country's situation and the
options it faces. 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, India, China, and Africa 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 by drawing
on everything he has learned to offer an integrated set of solutions to the
interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most
frequently hold societies back. In the end, he 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.

On the web: (...).edu/endofpoverty/

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The path from poverty to development has come incredibly fast in the span of
human history. Two hundred years ago, the idea that we could potentially achieve
the end of poverty would have been unimaginable. Just about everybody was poor
with the exception of a very small minority of royals and landed gentry. Life
was as difficult in much of Europe as it was in India or China. With very few
exceptions, your great-great-grandparents were poor and most likely living on
the farm. One leading economic historian, Angus Maddison, puts the average
income per person in Western Europe in 1820 at around 90 percent of the average
income of sub-Saharan Africa today. Life expectancy in Western Europe and Japan
as of 1800 was probably about forty years.

There was little sense a few centuries ago of vast divides in wealth and poverty
around the world. China, India, Europe, and Japan all had similar income levels
at the time of European discoveries of the sea routes to Asia, Africa, and the
Americas. Marco Polo, of course, marveled at the sumptuous wonders of China, not
at its poverty. Cortés and his conquistadores expressed astonishment at the
riches of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs. The early Portuguese
explorers in Africa were impressed with the well-ordered towns in West Africa.

Until the mid-1700s, the world was remarkably poor by any of todayâ€Ös standards.
Life expectancy was extremely low; children died in vast numbers in the now rich
countries as well as the poor countries. Disease and epidemics, not just the
black death of Europe, but many waves of disease, from smallpox and measles to
other epidemics, regularly washed through society and killed mass numbers of
people. Episodes of hunger and extreme weather and climate fluctuations sent
societies crashing. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, for Arnold Toynbee,
was much like the rise and decline of all other civilizations before and since.
Economic history had long been one of ups and downs, growth followed by decline,
rather than sustained economic progress.

The Novelty of Modern Economic Growth

If we are to understand why vast gaps between rich and poor exist today, we need
therefore to understand a very recent period of human history during which these
vast gaps opened. The past two centuries, since around 1800, constitute a unique
era in economic history, a period that the great economic historian Simon
Kuznets famously termed the period of Modern Economic Growth, or MEG for short.
Before the era of MEG, indeed for thousands of years, there had been virtually
no sustained economic growth in the world and only gradual increases in the
human population…;

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Acknowledgements ix

Foreword by Bono xv

Introduction 1

1.

Global Family Portrait 5

2.

The Spread of Economic Prosperity 26

3.

Why Some Countries Fail to Thrive 51

4.

Clinical Economics 74

5.

Bolivia's High-Altitude Hyperinflation 90

6.

Poland's Return to Europe 109

7.

Reaping the Whirlwind: Russia's Struggle for Normalcy 131

8.

China: Catching Up After Half a Millenium 148

9.

India's Market Reforms: The Triumph of Hope Over Fear 170

10.

The Voiceless Dying: Africa and Disease 188

11.

The Millennium, 9/11, and the United Nations 210

12.

On-the-Ground Solutions for Ending Poverty 226

13.

Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty 244

14.

A Global Compact to End Poverty 266

15.

Can the Rich Afford to Help the Poor? 288

16.

Myths and Magic Bullets 309

17.

Why We Should Do It 329

18.

Our Generation's Challenge 347

Works Cited 369

Further Reading 372

Notes 376

Index 385 

Kritik

"Jeffrey Sachs is that rare phenomenon: an academic economist famous for his theories about why some countries are poor and others rich, and also famous for his successful practical work in helping poor countries become richer. In this long-awaited, fascinating, clearly and movingly written book, he distills his experience to propose answers to the hard choices now facing the world."ÿ Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

"Book and man are brilliant, passionate, optimistic and impatient . . . Outstanding."ÿ The Economist

"If there is any one work to put extreme poverty back onto the global agenda, this is it." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Paul Wolfowitz should read Jeffrey Sachs s compelling new book." Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

Professor Sachs has provided a compelling blueprint for eliminating extreme poverty from the world by 2025. Sachs s analysis and proposals are suffused with all the practical experience of his twenty years in the field working in dozens of countries across the globe to foster economic development and well-being. George Soros, financier and philanthropist

"Sachs proposes a many-pronged, needs-based attack . . . that is eminently practical and minimally pipe-dreamy . . . A solid, reasonable argument in which the dismal science offers a brightening prospect for the world's poor." Kirkus

"This is an excellent, understandable book on a critical topic and should be required reading for students and participants in public policy as well as those who doubt the problem of world poverty can be solved."ÿ Mary Whaley, Booklist 

Autoreninfo

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Health Policy and Management. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. He has twice been named among Time Magazine's 100 most influential world leaders. He was called by the New York Times, "probably the most important economist in the world," and by Time Magazine "the world's best known economist." A recent survey by The Economist ranked Sachs as among the world's three most influential living economists of the past decade. His other books includeÿCommon Wealth,ÿThe Price of Civilization,ÿTo Move the World,ÿandÿThe Age of Sustainable Development.