jeffrey sachs, ending poverty

I first heard about The Commonwealth Club of California a couple of years ago via a smarmy ad campaign featuring photos of sneering, hipper-than-thou “young adults” staring down their noses at the camera. The captions generally followed this convention: “After [seeing/reading/hearing] about [person p/event e] I had a few questions I wanted to ask [person p]. So I did.” For example, “After seeing the Vagina Monologues, I had a few questions I wanted to ask Eve Ensler. So I did.” I suppose that the campaigns were successful inasmuch as they brought the existence of the organization to my attention; yet I resisted attending an event or looking into membership precisely because of the snob factor the ad campaign implied.

Recently, though, a friend coaxed into attending a Commonwealth Club presentation by economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, advisor to secretary of the UN, and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I suppose it’s not to my credit that I’d never heard of him despite his reputation as a “celebrity economist”. After some googling and cursory reading, I naively pictured him as one of those free market fundamentalists who blame poverty in the poorer part of the world on the poor’s resistance to global laissez-faire capitalism. And, indeed, he does believe that the market can act as a powerful force for good. His position, however, is by no means as simpleminded as I’d assumed. One of the points to which his powerful and refreshingly pragmatic discussion circled back again and again is that the market can’t do any good for people who are so impoverished that they don’t even have access to a market. Participation in a market economy presupposes that you’re not fighting simply to stay alive.

Here are some additional points distilled from my scribbled notes.

• The impact of extreme poverty, particularly in Africa, is far more dire than I would have estimated. About 20,000 people, across the globe, die each day from poverty-related circumstances and conditions. That’s about 8 million deaths per year. Of that 8 million, about 3 million are children killed by malaria. The number of children dying each month from malaria is roughly equivalent to the number of children whose lives were taken by the recent tsunami disaster. Sachs: “What has happened to our country that we never discuss this?”
  
• The effects of global capitalism simply cannot be grasped as a whole. So long as we smooth over what Sachs calls “the bumpy terrain of reality” with slogans like “it’s a clash of civilizations” or “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, we will continue to find the world both difficult to interpret and hostile.
  
• Extreme poverty is caused by sets of factors peculiar to each impoverished region. In Africa, for example, a certain kind of mosquito carries a certain kind of malaria for which no preventative inoculation exists; populations are often distributed most densely where the only source of water is rainfall.
  
• People in extreme poverty have no access to a market and, moreover, no means of producing enough of surplus to become economically self-sufficient.; to end extreme poverty it will be necessary to raise the standard of people in extreme poverty to the level at which they can begin producing not only enough to sustain their daily lives but also a surplus which can be sold. This can be accomplished by providing villages and communities with some very basic and inexpensive necessities: access to clean water, a means of transporting goods and supplies, medical clinics, some amount of electrical power generation, an efficient means of communicating with the outside world. Sachs again and again emphasized the simplicity of many of such solutions: a mosquito bed net that costs $7 and lasts 5 years could prevent the majority of malaria transmission. To provide mosquito nets to everyone in high-risk regions would cost about $3 billion per year, or $3 per year per person in the rich world. An additional billion could connect most villages to the internet. Currently the rich world gives about 10 cents per person per year.
  
• Government corruption in poorer parts of the world tends to be cited as the primary excuse for not providing this assistance. “It’s just like throwing money into a hole; corrupt nations will never be productive.” There is, however, little if no correlation whatsoever between corruption and productivity. Over the last half of the 20th century, some countries well-known for government corruption have shown a tremendous amount of economic growth.
  
• The US gives about $2 billion per year toward the relief of extreme poverty around the globe – less than two days worth of the total Pentagon budget. Moreover, the majority of aid the US provides goes to US consultant fees – only a tiny portion actually goes directly to people in extreme poverty. The $2 billion that we currently give amount to about 0.02% of our GNP. A few years back, however, the US promised to give 0.07%. Merely keeping our promise would be enough to provide the kind of assistance required to break the cycle of purely subsistence living.

Finally, Sachs pointed out that, when polled, the American people tend to believe that we’re giving 30 times more than we actually are – a fact which, to him, justifies a cautious optimism. If the American public learns of how little we’re giving and of how little it would take to permanently end extreme poverty within our lifetimes, surely that public would demand that we at least adhere to our stated commitments. I hope he’s right.