The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

In The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (2005), leading economist Jeffrey D. Sachs draws on his extensive global experience to identify a path to end extreme poverty within 20 years. This work is inspired by, and in some ways modeled after, the classic John Maynard Keynes essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930). In the depths of the Great Depression, Keynes outlined a pathway to ending poverty in the industrialized countries near the end of the 20th century. As Keynes’s vision became reality with the eradication of extreme poverty in the rich countries of the developed world, Sachs calls on his generation to end extreme poverty entirely—a task he deems “our generation’s challenge.”

Sachs wrote The End of Poverty to identify the route by which extreme poverty could be globally eradicated by 2025. The book does not offer a broad prediction. Instead, it explains the economic realities by which extreme poverty persists and the means by which countries and peoples can begin ascending what Sachs calls the “ladder of economic prosperity.”

Although not formally sectioned, the book’s 18 chapters fall roughly into three parts. The first several chapters contain Sachs’s argument in broad terms while educating the reader in basic economic concepts, overviewing the geography of poverty, and providing a sense of relevant world history. The middle of the book traces the arch of Sachs’s career as an economist who has helped several countries transition or position their economies for market-based economic growth. As of the book’s publication in 2005, Sachs had also become intensely interested in development economics that may offer the framework by which problems of poverty can be addressed. The final chapters provide a detailed plan for eradicating the most extreme poverty, address common counterarguments, and situate Sachs’s call to end poverty as the continuation of Enlightenment ideals and an opportunity for his generation to make a lasting contribution to the improvement of the human condition.