Arrogance and the Idealist: a review & giveaway of Nina Munk's new Jeff Sachs bio

From Texas in Africa Mon Nov 4 2013, 15:42:00

It's hard to come up with anything to say about Nina Munk's magnificent new book that hasn't already been said. The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty takes as its task trying to understand Sachs and his Millennium Villages Project (MVP). Munk, who had a high level of access to Sachs and his staff for about six years, details the MVP as the realities of development, culture, and community preferences slam up against Sachs' expertise and view that the solutions to global poverty are primarily technical.

Others have written about how Munk beautifully portrays Sachs' hubris in the face of overwhelming evidence that some of his ideas are not working, pushback from experts and local leaders, and signals of distress from MVP field staff. This will no doubt be very satisfactory to Sachs' most stringent critics, who have long puzzled over why he was initially so resistant to having the MVP rigorously evaluated using the gold standard of impact evaluation methods, randomized control trials.

Munk's narrative is damning on these and many other accounts. It is an absolute must-read for anyone who is interested in doing good for those in need. Far from writing a cheerleader's account about someone who "just wants to help," Munk raises questions about whether poverty actually has technical solutions, or whether cultural norms and behaviors can derail even the most well-funded and planned activities. For example, Sachs' purpose-built livestock market in the Dertu, Kenya MVP now sits mostly unused. The reason? Somali-Kenyans living in the area don't want to sell their livestock in Dertu. Camels and goats are a sign of a family's wealth and serve as a kind of savings account for difficult times. In ordinary times, nobody wants to sell those animals - it would be like an American selling off her house to cash in on equity when he or she has no reason to want to move.

Technical solutions to the problems of poverty are all the rage in the era of randomized control ...

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