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The End of Poverty

Last week I saw Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs speak on his book The End of Poverty, and it was one of the best talks I've been to. Although I had believed, from the title of the book, that he was undoutedly an idealist, it turned out he really was just talking about ending extreme poverty. He defined extreme poverty as poverty so bad you can die from it.

Sachs has a similar viewpoint to Jared Diamond. He's very interested in why the extremely poor have gotten that way. Identifying the root causes, he believes that a small amount of money to fix the root causes can start these areas on the road to success. This was not a dull policy talk, though. He described in very emotional terms the suffering he has seen in the extremely poor areas of Africa.

One of the areas he talked most about was agriculture in Africa. Unlike India, Africa never had a Green revolution. Today, they use substandard varieties of crops, and no fertilizer. They are, he said, simply mining the ground. Simply using fertlizer should double the food output. Using new seed varieties (hybrids, not genetically modified crops) could result in a five-fold increase.

Another interesting problem was what he called the "disease burden" of Africa, which is unique. For example, malaria exists in India, but the mosquitos there bite cattle 70% of the time. Malaria transmission requires two human bites in a row, so there is only a 9% chance of transmission. Due to another disease in Africa which attacks cattle, there hasn't historically been any cattle in Africa, which means the mosquitos there evolved to attack humans exclusively. The malaria transmission rate therefore is 100% in Africa, since two consecutive mosquito bites will always be between two humans. Sachs said that with just a cheap mosquito net, which costs $5, lasts for years, and can protect two children at a time, the malaria problem can be greatly reduced.

Sachs believes that extreme poverty is solvable by the year 2020, and it only requires the political will to spend the money necessary. It won't be much money overall, but quite a bit more than we are spending right now. I don't know if I believe that extreme poverty can be solved so quickly. After all, there is still a significant amount of extreme poverty in India, which has been doing fairly well economically for a while. However, I can believe that by 2020 we can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel.