Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey

I really liked the chapter on clinical economics. I'm sure there are flaws to it (I think what Stephen says is very justified) but I appreciated Sach's diagnosis procedures. I think all too often a solid diagnosis is not given. Agencies strive to eliminate and problems before they even know what they are. Sachs has given us some great tools for assessing these problems.

What I find odd is that while he states over and over that "it's complicated," that the issues are many and often intertwined, he still recommends a blanket policy that will fix everything at once. It's like he's putting a giant band-aid on Africa (or maybe ten giant band-aids: one for malaria, one for education, one for clean water, one for hygiene, etc., etc.) that will solve it's problems. However, I think that because it's all so complicated we need something more along the lines of millions and millions of little band-aids. These are band aids that need to be put on by the people themselves, not just by a professor at Columbia.

I recently read an article in the Times about Sach's village projects. He's working with 80 or so villages as a test program for his big plan. The villages are doing remarkably well. Sach's knows what he's doing. But the problem is that he's going to try and scale it all up. He plans to stop working with small villages and start working with nations (and possibly continents) as a whole. It's not that the nature of the projects themselves prohibits it from working across the world, it's that these things need to be administered on a local basis, not a national one. I think that grass roots efforts work so well, like what he's doing with the 80 villages. But a top-down national program strand little chance in my opinion.