economics, oversimplification, greed

Many thanks to Thomas and Edison for bringing some critical perspectives to bear on economist Jeffrey Sach's account of how extreme poverty could be ended within our lifetimes.

Something a bit odd here - I usually find myself on the other side of discussions like this one. Meaning, I'm usually the one to object to arguments asserting that the market, somehow, will save us.

Thomas is quite right to point out that $3 billion per year won't magically turn into $7 mosquito bed nets for every poverty-stricken family in Africa. Some of that $3 billion will go toward inflated consultant fees, and some will fall through the inevitable cracks in a less-than-perfect system of production, transportation, and distribution. Assuming that, in real life, we're unable to "externalize" the costs that our neat theory overlooked, we'll inevitably wind up spending significantly more than we anticipated (assuming we're able to complete our task at all). Which certainly won't help us secure sufficient funding for next year's round of mosquito nets.

Edison takes an approach I've taken many times before in such discussions, namely that growth doesn't magically translate into less exploitative conditions for the working poor and, moreover, that we're not necessarily doing people a favor by bringing them into the "fold" of global capitalism.

I'm not sure how to address Thomas' concerns, other than to say Sachs, as a macro-economist, is most interested in providing a blueprint which has the capacity to motive us to action. Perhaps there is, indeed, an arrogance implicit in the whole macro-economic outlook, in the idea that it's even possible to summarize the (near-)infinite specificity of the world's details into a few graphs illustrating the output of a spreadsheet model. I'm not sure that Sachs' approach is quite so simplistic, however. He at least admits that a "one-size-fits-all" solution doesn't exist and he cautions us against reducing the symptoms of extreme poverty to a single, underlying illness. That said, I suspect Thomas is correct about Sach's underestimation of the true costs of alleviating extreme poverty within our lifetimes.

I think that Edison's concerns are also well-founded. And they raise the question of whether it even makes sense to talk about politics when we're literally talking about letting millions of people have a chance at surviving versus just letting them die, somewhere far beyond even the periphery of the media's gaze. I think Sachs is quite realistic in at least this distressing sense: the wealthy will help the poor only inasmuch as they believe they might receive a return on their "investment". I think that all Sachs is trying to do, ultimately, is convince those who refuse to invest without the possibility of a positive "return" that such a possibility exists. Why bother convincing them? Sadly, because they're the only ones who actually possess enough wealth to make a difference.