Note that figure of “10 million children,” the ones “dying every year of extreme poverty.” That’s the rhetorical club he wields against cynics, citing it without melodrama during long disquisitions on the conditions necessary to abolish extreme poverty. “Extreme poverty,” by the way, is a technical term in the jargon of the poverty-industrial complex. It doesn’t simply refer to those who are really, really poor. It is the threshold that defines the “bottom billion” of the world’s poor, the ones who earn less than a dollar a day. Extreme poverty—according to the Sachsians, at least—differs from ordinary poverty because the extremely impoverished are so poor, they lack the ability to lift themselves out of the “poverty trap,” another key Sachsian term. That phrase refers to the quicksand of disease, drought, and famine that renders a population unable to escape poverty by their own efforts.

The human cost: approximately 10 million children a year. We never see them appear and disappear from the planet. They may as well be 10 million miles away. Sachs doesn’t tell weepy sob stories about them. He just mentions the number and leaves it up to us to make of it what we will—or to convict ourselves of callousness if we use the abstract number to hold the suffering at arm’s length.



2. The Willy Loman of Antipoverty ProductsSeeing Sachs in action in Tokyo was useful for thinking about these questions. I sat in on about a half-dozen meetings and a shabu-shabu luncheon in the basement restaurant of a Tokyo skyscraper with foreign-ministry officials and got a sense of how Sachs does his job—saving the world and all that—on a daily basis. It’s low-key, collegial, often technical and intellectual, but when you come down to it, Sachs is the Willy Loman of the dev biz. He’s got a six-point program to restore anti­poverty programs after the crash. No, two six-point programs. (Point three of program two: “The dollar will need to depreciate relative to a basket of Asian currencies, a tricky maneuver but no less important for that.”) He has 80 Millennium Villages, demonstration communities in underdeveloped sub-Saharan Africa that need investment at a time when nobody’s investing, even in developed countries. He needs R&D funding for giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the desert that he thinks could solve the renewable-energy problem. On and on.

So at the heart of the do-gooder’s job is incessant travel to do-gooder conferences, public and private, to sell a line of goods. He just got in from Norway, he said in Tokyo. “Norway was a meeting on climate change hosted by the minister of foreign affairs,” he told me over the breakfast buffet at the Palace Hotel. “Since they do such good things, and I have so many links with them, when they called I just had to squeeze it in.”

It’s all about those links. After Tokyo, he’s off to Shanghai and then to South Korea, where a member of the Jeffrey Sachs do-gooder mafia has just been elected prime minister. “The new prime minister is a longtime friend and colleague of mine,” Sachs says. “He is the mentor, in many ways, of the secretary general”—United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon—“who was his deputy, and he’s now acting as special envoy, and suddenly he became prime minister just a couple of weeks ago, and I told him I was going to be in Asia and would like to stop by.”

“At this stage of my life”—Sachs is 54—“it’s actually quite remarkable to see so many colleagues from graduate school or from early days in senior positions. Bob Zoellick and I worked together at Harvard, and he’s of course president of the World Bank now. But we go back 30 years. Today, a classmate of mine was nominated to be deputy governor of the central bank of Japan.” It’s not that Sachs is well-connected. He is the connection.

While he’s known for his association with celebs like Bono and Angelina Jolie (MTV made a documentary called The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa), it’s this government-NGO-academia-think-tank-consultant network that powers the Sachs machine. He makes the connections between the PowerPoints and the power people.