A lite kick in the Sachs

What I've read from Jeffrey Sachs can be found if you root around in the following links and find a response he writes to a critique from the Washington Post, which is to say, very little. However I've found some stuff from Dan Drezner that has me curious. He, Drezner, starts a worthy discussion on Sachs' The End of Poverty and has a pretty fair (the impartial kind, not the mediocre kind) review of it in the NY Times. If anything it makes me want to pick up Sachs' book and plug away, it's just that now I believe I'll have some things to think about while I'm reading it.

Speaking of foreign policy-ish books I'd like to read, "The World is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman looks, and I use the word a little loosely, exciting. For a good review of this book check this from Slate, For an example of a writer wanking with his keyboard in search of a "good clip" see Matt Taibbi battle Friedman’s use of metaphors and completely refuse to engage with a single idea.

Rover on the media

I've read before that Karl Rove doesn't make many appearances outside of stumping for his man, so I found this piece in the Washington Post rather novel. Whatever you think of this guy, he's damned shrewd, so I'd assume most will take anything he says with a grain (or two) of salt. That being said, this quote was what got me: "I'm not sure I've talked about the liberal media," Rove said when a student inquired -- a decision he said he made "consciously." The press is generally liberal, he argued, but "I think it's less liberal than it is oppositional."

Taken at face value, this additude makes whole lot more sense to me than the conspiratorial blatherings I usually come accross on the topic of liberal bias. And, poof!!. Just like that, Rove seems less like he-who-must-not-be-named and more like reasonable human being. Weird.

awesome book

I'm reading an amazing book called The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, a PH.D economist, now at Columbia, and head of the UN Millenium Development Project. It is blowing my mind. Everyone on the planet, but especially everyone in the United States, should read this book. He very briefly and cogently explains how the world went from fairly uniform poverty across the globe 200 years ago to its current state of vast inequity, a change that coincided with an explosion in global population. He shows how the rich countries got rich and why the poor countries stayed poor, and he shows how some countries have dragged, or are dragging, themselves out of poverty. He disects poverty, showing its different degrees and their distribution throughout the globe. Most importantly, he argues that extreme poverty, the 1 billion people (1/6 of the world) that lives on less than a dollar a day, can be eliminated by the year 2025 if the world's rich countries decide to take the necessary measures, which aren't even that strenuous.
This guy has a great deal of real world experience advising the governments of developing countries, and he has had a great deal of success. He is very much pro-free trade, but he is also very critical of the United States and other rich countries for their failure to prioritize international aid and debt relief. He is neither a starbucks brick-thrower nor an unqualified free-market Milton Friedman economist. In other words, he's awesome. If you have a chance, you owe it to yourself to take a look.