Jeffrey Sachs's Failed Poverty Experiment in Africa

One thing is made clear in Nina Munk's new book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, it's that solving poverty isn't easy. Not even for Sachs, the celebrated and indefatigable economist who proclaimed it was eminently solvable in 2005, in his book "The End of Poverty." With thoughtful planning and just a little more help from the developed world, we could even do it by 2025, he argued. But Sachs's quest—which plays out in the handful of villages in sub-Saharan Africa that comprise his Millennium Villages Project (MVP)—seems to falter at every turn.