William Easterly on Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest To End Poverty

The simplicity of Jeffrey Sachs' formula for ending poverty made it ideal for a successful advocacy campaign. Ending poverty, he argued, was just a matter of raising enough money to pay for the solutions to the poor's problems. Sachs would demonstrate those solutions in a dozen or so "Millennium Villages" in Africa; success would build on success to scale his fixes up throughout the continent.

Ending poverty turned out not to be nearly so simple. William Easterly reviews Nina Munk's The Idealist, a book that chronicles how Sachs' dream fell a bit short of reality.