3. Monetizing the Western ConscienceEven in good economic times, altruism is a hard sell. Good luck getting anything out of Congress, where foreign aid has long been about as popular as child porn and which has lately reserved its largesse for the bankers who destroyed our economy.

Still, you have to admire the shrewd way in which Sachs has managed to find a chink in the armor of some of America’s largest private corporations. He divulges his strategy one afternoon at his elegant Upper West Side townhouse, which he shares with his wife, Sonia, and their three children. Columbia University bought the property when it lured him from Harvard in 2002; the university, not Sachs, owns it. It’s an enviable if not showy abode, the walls of which are covered with intricately patterned Bolivian woven fabrics.

The secret of his pitch to corporate America is the way he has sought to put a price on meaning. A low, low price.

He has intuited that, deep down, we all would find a greater sense of meaning in life if we believed that we were engaged, even at a distance, in saving 10 million children a year. Sachs is offering that at rock-bottom rates.

“If my theory is right, and just 1 percent of what we have could make the transformative difference abroad?” he says. “First of all, a lot of people are willing to spend 1 percent on meaning, you know. If it turned out that really you need 10 percent or 15 percent of what we have” to end extreme poverty, “then it’s going to have to be someone else giving a sermon, probably about salvation and fire and brimstone. But if it’s just 1 percent, you can see so many pathways.”

If my theory is right... Of course, there’s that little matter.

But through strength of will, savvy publicity, and a boost from the U.N., Sachs has pushed his agenda to the fore, to the bestseller lists, to Charlie Rose and the New York Times editorial page. For better or worse, the Sachs plan is the most visible one on the table.

What does it consist of? In patchwork charity efforts of the past, “humanitarian rescue” has meant parachuting in vaccination teams here, distributing seed stock there, but with little coordination. As Sachs’ PowerPoint presentation shows, if you bring five or six key elements together, you reach critical mass—the anti­poverty tipping point—and you boost the victims of extreme poverty over the threshold to ordinary poverty, where they are able to make a transition to sustainable living, if not immediate prosperity. That’s what he says he has already accomplished with his Millennium Villages in sub-Saharan African nations.

“These are all previously existing villages,” Sachs told me. “They were impoverished, hungry, and basically devoid of infrastructure and public services at the start of the project.” Sachs persuaded the U.N. to endorse his “quick-impact” program to put the villages on the road to sustainability in 2005. He got key funding from the government of Japan and from private philanthropists he roped in himself, as well as from the U.N. By 2006, after the Sachs blitz, villages like Sauri, in Kenya; Koraro, in Ethiopia; and Mwandama, in Malawi, were seeing food-production increases of 5, 8, and 15 times, respectively.

The idea is that once these villages—which now incorporate a total of about a half-million people, he says—reach economic self-sufficiency, they begin to spread, attracting government and private investment.

Critics have disagreed; one called the Millennium Villages “development Disneylands,” public-relations showcases. But Sachs says what they really show is that it would cost less than seven-tenths of a penny from each dollar of the developed world’s gross national product to end extreme poverty.

“You’ve monetized the Western conscience, right?” I found myself asking Sachs, almost plaintively. “You’ve put a price on how little it would cost to feel good about ourselves.”

“I guess it’s true,” he said. “I’m trying to give people no excuses not to do this.”

When he talks to companies, his pitch is all about talent recruitment and “reputational costs.” He says, “These businesses are finding that when they go to the campuses in the U.S.” to recruit, “often the first thing they hear is, ‘So what are you doing in Africa?’ And they’re stunned. ‘What do you mean, what are we doing? We’re not doing anything in Africa.’ And the students say to them, ‘Well, I want to work for a company that’s doing something in Africa, because I think that’s important.’ And so many companies have come to me and said, ‘We want to do something in Africa; otherwise we can’t recruit.’ It’s very practical.”