Brother, Can You Spare $195 Billion?

Review of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. By Jeffrey D. Sachs.

The $195 billion is the additional amount added to foreign aid budgets that Jeffrey Sachs argues could eliminate world poverty by 2025. If properly allocated both by the aid agencies and by the recipient governments. In his review, Daniel Drezner is skeptical, noting, among other things, that

His [Sachs's] unspoken assumption is that governments as corrupt as Nigeria's or Kenya's would allocate health or education investments in a nonpolitical manner.

Sachs also cannot give his goal of eliminating poverty priority over his own domestic political concerns.

He shrewdly observes that in the past, support from America's religious right has been crucial for encouraging foreign aid. At the same time he deplores ''irrational biblical prophecy,'' which, he says, ''is terrifying for those of us who would rather use rationality than scriptural prophecy to determine U.S. foreign policy.'' This is hardly the kind of comment calculated to win Christian conservatives to his side.