1. Do-Gooders Are...IrritatingTokyo: The Palace Hotel. Breakfast with Jeffrey Sachs.

Admit it: Do-gooders are irritating. They make the rest of us seem so self-serving, selfish, and self-absorbed. And of course—for the most part—we are, but who likes to be reminded of it? Yes, millions are starving to death in Africa, but we’ve got our own problems to worry about now. Yet the do-gooders still want to make us feel guilty about famine somewhere far off. Irritating.

But take a moment and consider the plight of Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most prominent poverty fighters, America’s intellectual do-gooder-in-chief. Even when the West was flush with cash, his was no easy task: maniacally crisscrossing the globe, going from one poverty confab to another, trying to get the do-gooder bureaucracies of the world on the same page. Now that we’re in economic free fall? Forget it.

Nobody wants to hear about the eternal “plight of the poor” or what seems like an endless series of famines and slaughters. An estimated $500 billion in aid has been funneled into Africa in the past half-century, and it was never enough. There were always well-meaning types like Sachs, coming around again and again with a metaphorical begging bowl for some new plan or other that would finally fix things and allow us to cross an item off our bucket list: “Cure poverty—done.” ( View a slideshow featuring some of Jeffrey Sachs' celebrity friends.)

But now we’ve got people being forced out into the streets in the great cities of the West, and we’ve got to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to thank the bankers for bankrupting our economy, for god’s sake. Who wants to hear about starving children?

I’d been wondering about the dynamics of do-gooderism even before the crash, back when I had breakfast with Sachs in Tokyo at the Palace Hotel (named after the nearby Imperial Palace) in March 2008. Sachs, the PowerPoint man for Bono and Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Angelina Jolie, had let me accompany him on one of his high-level begging missions to Japan. ( View a graphic outlining Jeffrey Sach's grueling itineary.)

It was a surreal scene that morning. People wearing full-face, high-tech surgical masks and garbed in business attire drifted through the hotel lobby, acting as if that combination weren’t a bit weird or ominous. I thought there must have been some post-atomic Japanese horror movie being filmed nearby until Sachs explained.

It was not fear of breathing in germs, pollution, or radiation-tainted air that motivated the mask wearers, he said. Rather, it was a manifestation of the admirable politesse of Japanese culture: Those who had a cold or the flu wore a mask to better avoid infecting others.

Still, instinctively, it was hard not to feel disapproved of—that the masks were a reproof, as if the wearers were protecting themselves from our uncleanliness. I came to think of this as a kind of metaphor for the way one feels in the presence of all types of do-gooders; it’s as if they’re wearing invisible masks to protect themselves from the cynical, inertial moral contagion of our indifference.

Sachs himself doesn’t give off that vibe of do-gooder disdain. His is not the guilt-tripping emotionalism of a Sally Struthers trudging through the muck of a third-world village on a late-night TV ad, swatting flies away from children with famine-swollen bellies, rubbing our noses in the stench of our unconcern.

No, Sachs is careful to make understated appeals to reason, logic, and economic theory. His two best­selling books, The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, are replete with challenging charts and eye-glazing graphs. Here’s where we are; here’s where the differential equations say we can be, ­saving the starving from Sally Struthers.