I'm reading this great and challenging book by Jeffrey Sachs called The End of Poverty. Sachs is a part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and has an incredible economic mind, balanced outlook, and passion to see the end of extreme poverty.
With each page I turn, I learn more about how people are climbing out of poverty and the viscious cycle of extreme poverty in the world. Sachs also explores the role the rest of the world can play in meeting needs and in turn, I face my own greediness, ignorance, and love of things that, pathetically, I still don't even realize the depths of.
Here's a little blurb from the intro...
Every morning our newspapers could report, "More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty." The stories would put the stark numbers in context- up to 8,000 children dead of malaria, 5,000 mothers and father dead of tuberculosis. 7,500 young adults dead of AIDS, and thousands more dead of diarrhea, respiratory infection, and other killer diseases that prey on bodies weakened by chronic hunger. The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water. They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, such stories rarely get written...
Read it!
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1 comment:
that book changed the way i view poverty and the role we can play as the necessity to find a solution becomes more urgent (plus, he's a brilliant economist so it gave me a brain high!). should be considered a must-read for anyone passionate about eradicating poverty and third-world development.
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