Nina Munk on Poverty, Development, and the Idealist

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2014

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Nina Munk, journalist and author of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book. Munk spent six years following Jeffrey Sachs and the evolution of the Millennium Villages Project--an attempt to jumpstart a set of African villages in hopes of discovering a new template for development. Munk details the great optimism at the beginning of the project and the discouraging results after six years of high levels of aid. Sach's story is one of the great lessons in unintended consequences and the complexity of the development process.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:07.8	of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can
0:13.6	subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's
0:18.1	conversation. We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever
0:22.7	done going back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:32.2	Today is January 16, 2014, and my guest is Nina Monk, journalist and author of The Idealist,
0:40.5	Jeffrey Sachs, and The Quest to End Poverty. Nina, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:46.0	Thanks for having me. Our topic today is your book, The Idealist. It's a rather extraordinary
0:51.2	book. A book I resisted reading because I thought I knew how it turned out, but I'm very glad I
0:57.2	read it. It had a powerful effect on me, and I want to start with how you came to write the book.
1:01.8	Give us the backstory. Well, I started it in 2006. As you know, I am not an economist. I'm not an
1:11.5	expert in international development or aid. I'm a longtime journalist, and I spent many years
1:17.9	writing, not only for Vanity Fair, but for Forbes and Fortune, the New York Times magazine,
1:24.7	largely on finance and Wall Street business. My last book was on the disastrous AOL time Warner
1:33.5	merger. At some point, after having written about billionaires, as I often like to say over and
1:40.9	over again for a long time, I thought to myself it was really time to change focus. In 2006,
1:50.8	I think like a lot of people, it occurred to me that something was really out of whack. That
1:57.8	was the year, as you may recall, that the Dow closed above 12,000 for the first time. It seemed
2:04.7	to some people that if there wasn't actually a bubble on the horizon, something was off,
2:12.1	and that it became, at least to me, very, very clear that this issue of income disparity,
2:19.3	this issue of what we now refer to as the 1% was looming and was important. It mattered a
2:26.0	great deal to me, and I wanted to look into it more deeply. I began originally, it was not a book,
	...

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