September 11, 2005 7:30 PM
The Prophet of Economic Possibilities for the Poor
“Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.”
So ends The End of Poverty, the latest book not by a theologian but by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Time magazine and the New York Times call Sachs the world’s most important and best-known economist. He rubs shoulders not only with the U.N.’s Kofi Annan, but with everybody from the Pope to U2’s Bono.
Bono writes in the introduction to Sachs’s book that Sachs is an economist “who can bring to life statistics that were, after all, lives in the first place. He can look up from the numbers and see faces through the spreadsheets.”
The lecture brought to life the faces Sachs sees the faces Sachs sees—namely, the nearly half of the world’s 6 billion people who are poor, especially the 20,000 people who die each day because of extreme poverty.
“Extreme” poverty is defined as getting by on less than $1 a day; being chronically hungry, without health care, safe drinking water and education; and possibly even lacking shelter and shoes.
“Ending poverty is a grand moral task, and a geopolitical imperative, but at the core it is a relatively straightforward investment proposition,” Sachs wrote in an editorial in London’s the Guardian newspaper earlier this year.
Sachs described not how daunting the problems are but how solvable. He talked about what can be done to make a real difference—what we can do as individuals and what we must ask our governments and institutions to do. The audience was inspired by an academic who, as one former senior administration official put it, has nearly completed “the transition from economist to Old Testament prophet.”
Worship services and the lecture by Jeffrey Sachs were part of a day of reflection on ending extreme poverty across the globe. In addition to the regular service at 9 am and the service of Holy Eucharist in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at 11 am, there was a special interfaith service of music and prayer at 4 pm led by Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, former secretary of state of the United States, the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold III, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA, and the Most Rev. Njongonkulu W. H. Ndungane, archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The Cathedral Choir, the St. Camillus Multicultural Choir and the African Heritage Dancers and Drummers participated in the service, and the Camillus Multicultural Choir also sang the 3:30 pm choral prelude preceding the service.