The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

by Nina Munk Narrated by Susan Nezami

Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Bloomberg ¿ Forbes ¿ The Spectator

Recipient of Foreign Policy's 2013 Albie Award


A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty
****
*"The poor you will always have with you," to cite the Gospel of Matthew 26:11. Jeffrey Sachs-celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller*The End of Poverty-disagrees.* In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending*extreme*poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
*
*********** In 2006, Sachs launched*the Millennium Villages Project,*a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa.*The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging.*With his first taste of success, and backed*by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors,*Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries.*Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea.
*
******* For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs's formula for ending global poverty.*
*
******** THE IDEALIST is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the reality of human life.

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2013 - AudioFile

Narrator Susan Nezami presents Munk’s six-year study of Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Villages Project in Africa. Economist Sachs had the best of intentions when he launched the project with the aim of eliminating poverty by providing financial support to boost the extremely poor into a more sustainable existence. Nezami, in a measured and journalistic tone, details the factors that prompted the Millennium Villages’ creation, the project’s administrative structure, and the problems that ended up plaguing the effort. Nezami is dispassionate in reporting these challenges as well as Sachs's evolving realization that he had neglected to account for some human factors that could make or break the project as a whole. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

Vanity Fair contributing editor Munk (Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner) spent six years chronicling the Millennium Villages Project, the pet project that lauded economist Sachs (The End of Poverty) launched in 2006. The project’s goal was an audacious attempt to prove Sachs’s well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve theories about ending extreme poverty in Africa by focusing on a handful of carefully selected villages with the expectation that their halo effect would spread throughout the country. Munk artfully observes how Sachs’s infectious enthusiasm and optimism bring attention (and funding, including million from George Soros) to the fledgling organization at home and abroad. Sachs ably illustrates how tactics like lacing mosquito nets with insecticides to fight malaria can make significant headway in achieving a larger goal of helping communities improve their circumstances and chances for development.” It’s a noble effort, but Sachs and his compatriots soon find that they wildly underestimated the difficulty of distributing those crucial nets, the impact of drought, as well as the learned helplessness of the recipients. All of these factors contribute to a less-than-ideal outcome. Students of economic policy and altruistic do-gooders alike will find Munk’s work to be a measured, immersive study of a remarkable but all-too-human man who let his vision get the best of him. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Recipient of Foreign Policy's 2013 Albie Award
Bloomberg "Best Books of 2013"
Forbes "Best Books of 2013"
The Spectator "Best Books of 2013"
Canada's National Business Book Award Finalist
ISI’s Henry and Anne Paolucci Book Award Nominee


"Munk draws a nuanced portrait of Sachs and his Millennium Villages Project . . . worth taking the time to read it. It’s a valuable—and, at times, heartbreaking—cautionary tale." —Bill Gates

"A sharply rendered and deeply disillusioned account of [Jeffrey Sachs'] personal quest to end poverty. . . . With impressive persistence, unflagging empathy and journalistic derring-do, Ms. Munk returns over a five-year period to Dertu and one other village to document the project's progress. . . . Heartbreaking." —The Wall Street Journal
 
"One of the most readable and evocative accounts of foreign aid ever written, The Idealist shows that virtually nothing about such aid is ever easy. . . .  A masterful tale of good intentions gone wrong." —William Easterly, Barron’s

“A stark reminder that the war against poverty is not yet won. A must-read.” —Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid

"Writing accessibly about development economics is a high-wire act, but Munk accomplishes it brilliantly. She shadows Sachs as he cajoles world leaders to fund his Millennium projects, and also visits those places to tell the whole story. The final chapter, in which Munk interviews a chastened Sachs (usually an oxymoron), is particularly devastating." —Foreign Policy

"A fascinating portrait of an innovative thinker as well as a fair-minded examination of his methods. It’s also a testament to the enduring value of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—it should be read not just in policy circles but also at J-schools." —Vanity Fair

“Magnificent. . . .  An absolute must-read for anyone who is interested in doing good for those in need.” —The Christian Science Monitor

"Munk tracks a messianic economist’s quixotic attempts to show that he can end African poverty. In one village his team gets farmers to grow maize instead of traditional matoke; there are no buyers for the bumper crop, and rats end up eating much of it. Munk describes a growing gulf between good intentions and hard reality with nuance and sensitivity." —Forbes

"An engaging, eye-opening read." —The Guardian

"A highly readable examination of Jeffrey Sachs’s Millennium Villages Project in Africa"
—Financial Times

"The Idealist tracks the messianic economist Jeffrey Sachs’s doomed attempt to solve African poverty by establishing a network of model villages where his pet theories could be tested before being escalated. The author, Nina Munk, who spent six years interviewing Sachs and visiting the Millenium Villages, is a delicate, careful writer. She not only reminds us that there are good, solid reasons why certain areas of the world remain desperately poor, she raises troubling questions about the credibility of an economist embraced by rock singers and film stars." —The Spectator

"A fine writer with a gift for deploying spare, vivid detail, Munk overcomes the burden of what could be duller-than-dirt subject matter—the politics of foreign aid; the ins and outs of Uganda's matoke market; NGO infighting over anti-malaria efforts—into a lively and at times, quite funny book." —Fortune

"A deep and important book. . . . The Idealist tells the stories behind the numbers and its evidence is as compelling and as important as anything in the data." —The Lancet

"Munk is a sly, relentless reporter with a gift for wedding her observations to a fluent, even graceful, writing style" —The Globe & Mail

"This book is stark proof that approach just does not work. . . . The world needs to pay attention to these lessons and stop wasting resources." —Bloomberg

"Nina Munk's brilliant book on [Jeffrey] Sachs' anti-poverty efforts, chronicles how his dream fell far short of reality" —Reason

"Written over six years, with exhaustive on-the-ground reporting from two African communities that are part of MVP village clusters, [Nina] Munk’s book is a readable and fast-paced chronicle of the real-world consequences of elite intellectual arrogance....Munk’s authoritative telling of Sach’s story is most valuable as an exhortation to intellectual humility, and a compulsively readable portrait of a man without any." —Commentary 

"A fascinating and essential exploration of what goes wrong when unchecked audacity and clinical precision encounter the frailties, ambiguities, and unpredictabilities of human beings, societies and histories." —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Not only an important book, but a truly enjoyable read. She does not boast, but the reader cannot avoid the impression that her intrepid years in Sachsland have demanded all the inner steel of the most hardened explorer or war correspondent." —The Weekly Standard 

“Students of economic policy and altruistic do-gooders alike will find Munk’s work to be a measured, immersive study of a remarkable but all-too-human man who let his vision get the best of him.” —Publishers Weekly
 
"Trenchant and thought-provoking." —Kirkus Reviews
 
"A fine contrarian polemic full to brimming with excellent reporting." —The Globe & Mail
 
"Heart-rending. . . . The catalogue of bright ideas that go awry would be funny if it weren’t so tragic." —National Post
 
"A testament to the enduring value of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—it should be read not just in policy circles but also at J-schools.” —Vanity Fair Daily
 
"A devastating portrait of hubris and its consequences.” —Pacific Standard
 
"A fascinating and essential exploration of what goes wrong when unchecked audacity and clinical precision encounter the frailties, ambiguities, and unpredictabilities of human beings, societies and histories.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“Nina Munk has written a fascinating book about a fascinating man—and even more important, about a set of ideas that are intriguing and important.” —Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large of Time magazine and author of New York Times Bestseller The Post-American World

“Jeffrey Sachs is a global phenomenon: no one thinks as big, makes a more passionate case for foreign aid, and works as hard to make the dream of ending global poverty a reality. This terrific book gives you a ringside seat on Sachs’s tireless global quest to get donors, governments, international agencies, private firms, and poor farmers to buy into his vision of economic development. Nina Munk’s portrayal goes beyond the man and his dream; it is a clear-headed depiction of the challenges the world’s poorest face as they struggle to improve their lives.” —Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University and author of The Globalization Paradox

"A riveting narrative that must be read to understand why the over $700 billion pumped into Africa by the West since 1960 has achieved so little. This powerful book will shake up the foreign aid development community." —George Ayittey, President of the Free Africa Foundation, and author of Africa Unchained
 
"A powerful exposé of hubris run amok, drawing on touching accounts of real-life heroes fighting poverty on the front line." —Robert Calderisi, author of The Trouble with Africa
 
“The Idealist confirms that in the quest to end extreme poverty in Africa, the truly wise and resonant voices are those of the Africans themselves.”  —Roger Thurow, author of The Last Hunger Season
 
"Nina Munk’s incisive, moving and elegantly written report takes us to Africa to see first-hand that the poor don’t need one more central planner with the prescription for prosperity. What the poor need is what really made the rich rich – the legal devices to join their continent’s vast, dispersed natural and human resources into valuable combinations through their own collective action." —Hernando de Soto, President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, and author of The Mystery of Capital

DECEMBER 2013 - AudioFile

Narrator Susan Nezami presents Munk’s six-year study of Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Villages Project in Africa. Economist Sachs had the best of intentions when he launched the project with the aim of eliminating poverty by providing financial support to boost the extremely poor into a more sustainable existence. Nezami, in a measured and journalistic tone, details the factors that prompted the Millennium Villages’ creation, the project’s administrative structure, and the problems that ended up plaguing the effort. Nezami is dispassionate in reporting these challenges as well as Sachs's evolving realization that he had neglected to account for some human factors that could make or break the project as a whole. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

A journalist's probing account of renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs' Utopian experiment in ending global poverty. In 2005, Sachs, a "guru" to celebrity activists like Bono and Angelina Jolie, published a best-selling book, The End of Poverty, which claimed that poverty could be eliminated by 2025. His proposal was simple. Developed nations and private donors would pool together massive amounts of foreign aid to invest in forms of self-help that included fertilizer and high-yield grain to improve agricultural output and mosquito nets to prevent malaria. Starting in 2006, Vanity Fair contributor Munk (Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, 2004) followed Sachs on his quixotic quest. She traveled with him on several occasions to Africa, where she watched as he and his team of development experts worked on the Millennium Villages Project, a five-year experiment designed to improve the economic and social well-being of 12 sub-Saharan villages. Sachs' success with the first Millennium Village in rural Kenya gave him the validation he needed to approach philanthropists like billionaire George Soros and ask for the funds he needed to implement his larger project. However, Sachs underestimated the difficulties he would encounter. Drought, political violence, aging infrastructure, traditional cultural values and resistance to change all undermined the goals of the project--as did the presence of other forms of foreign aid. In some areas, U.N. assistance programs fostered a dependency on outside sources that served as a deterrent to self-empowerment and created what one of Sachs' colleagues called "refugee syndrome." Munk is most effective in her depiction of the dangers inherent in imposing theories on the complex and ever-changing lives of real human beings. Radical new ideas are necessary to facilitate change, but no matter how brilliant, they will always and invariably have their limits. Trenchant and thought-provoking.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172192845
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/10/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Part One
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Idealist"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Nina Munk.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Videos