Whiz kid.(The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time)(Book Review)

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin, 320 pp., $27.95)

ON U2's 1987 hit album The Joshua Tree, lead singer Bono belted out a powerful number in which he claimed, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." He didn't know it at the time, but apparently what the Irish rocker was seeking was a pasty-skinned and energetic development economist. The economist was then spending time shuttling between La Paz, Bolivia, and Cambridge, Mass., helping the Bolivian government try to put its economy on a path to stabilization and growth. That economist was Jeffrey Sachs.

Over the last two decades, Bono has deftly used his international fame and wealth to morph from a rock star into a development activist. He trots the globe, pestering heads of state to give more money to combat AIDS in Africa, jawing finance ministers to relieve Third World debt, and telling Larry King's audience how much more the U.S. can be doing to combat global poverty. The world of global-development activists is small, so Bono has come to work closely with Jeffrey Sachs on several projects.

During that same period, Sachs used his intelligence and ambition to morph from an obscure development economist into something of an academic rock star. In the foreword to Sachs's new book, The End of Poverty, Bono writes of a flight he took with Sachs when a star-struck stewardess asked the singer for his autograph. Pointing to the rumpled academic sitting next to him, Bono told the attendant, "The man with me is Jeffrey D. Sachs. In time, his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine." Time will tell; meanwhile, to determine whether Bono is on to something, we can turn to Sachs's book.

Sachs has devoted the last three decades to helping the poorest and most crisis-prone regions of the world. His tale takes him from Bolivia to Poland and Russia to China and India and, most recently, Africa. In most of these cases, Sachs is brought in by government officials to give them advice on how to get their economies on track.

In his travels, Sachs quickly discovered that excelling at Harvard--he was among the youngest tenured professors in the school's history--was not enough to facilitate economic growth or combat global poverty. Each country's case, as Sachs explains, is different; and each one requires a different set of policy prescriptions. Bolivia is landlocked, making economic development tricky. Poland and Russia were both emerging from Communist shackles. India's colonial history has made it mistrustful of globalization and trade. Africa's geography and disease problems keep it mired in poverty.

All his book learning wasn't cutting it in the real world, so Sachs was forced to think on his feet and react to the situations as he found them. Likening development economics to medicine, Sachs has coined a concept he calls "clinical economics." Countries are patients. Economists like Sachs are doctors and must diagnose what's wrong. Only then--and not from plush chairs at the IMF or World Bank--can they "prescribe a course of treatment." According to Sachs, in addition to a changed approach, ending poverty requires something else: money. Sachs says the developed world's governments and businesses need to embrace debt cancellation and combine that with increased spending on aid.