Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Poverty, Development, and the Idealist
Poverty, Development, and the Idealist
Mar 19, 2026 5:15 AM

In the latest EconTalk podcast, Nina Munk, journalist and author of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, talks about how she 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. As Munk notes, Sach’s story is one of the great lessons in unintended consequences and plexity of the development process.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Previous Article：Evaluating Net Neutrality via Walter Eucken Next Article：Pete Seeger, 1919-2014
Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Economic Freedom Brings Freedom from Poverty
“Today, we live in the most prosperous time in human history,” notes the the Index of Economic Freedom, an annual guide published by The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation. “Poverty, sicknesses, and ignorance are receding throughout the world, due in large part to the advance of economic freedom.” The Index covers 10 freedoms – from property rights to entrepreneurship – in 186 countries. So why should we care about economic freedom around the world? Because it is a...
Do Half of All Public School Children Live in Poverty?
Back in October I offered five guidelines on “how to be a better guesstimater,” ways to hone your skills at guessing and estimation — guesstimation — that will help us minimize innumeracy. A recent Washington Post article—“Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty”—shows how applying these five tips could prevent people from falling for obviously inaccurate reporting. Here is the main claim of the article: For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S....
From Inmates to CEOs
If you’re a convicted criminal, finding a job while you’re in prison is often easier than getting one after you’ve served your time. Because of an expansive list of mandatory post-release sanctions, inmates often leave prison facing what Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former director of the National Institute of Justice, has called a secondary “invisible punishment” that is frequently more severe than the one levied by any judge or jury....
Greeks Lurch Left
It gets really interesting now in the wake of Syriza’s stunning victory in yesterday’s Greek elections, widely interpreted as a populist rejection of austerity programs that could spread to other indebted European Union basket cases. All eyes on are Alexis Tsipras, the newly-sworn in prime minister (in a highly unusual secular ceremony), with a lot of unanswered questions about how his party will govern. (Syriza is the transliterated Greek acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left). I’ve been following this...
Get Useless: Stewardship in the Economy of Wonder
“This is useless. This is gratuitous. This is wonder.” –Evan Koons When we consider the full realm of Christian stewardship, our minds immediately turn to areas like business, finance, ministry, the arts, education, and so on — the placeswhere we “get things done.” But while each of these is indeed an important area of focus, for the Christian, stewardship also involves creating the space to stop and simply behold our God. Yes, we are called to be active and diligent...
C.S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism
David J. Theroux, founder and president of The Independent Institute and the C.S. Lewis Society of California, discusses the writings of C.S. Lewis and Lewis’s views on liberty, natural law and statism. ...
Radio Free Acton: Jeffrey Tucker on Capitalism and Love
Jeffrey Tucker speaks at the 2015 Acton Lecture Series It’s always good to e old friends to the Acton Building. Last week it was our pleasure to e Jeffrey Tucker, author, speaker, and the founder and Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.meto Grand Rapids in order to deliver the first Acton Lecture Series lecture of 2015, entitled “Capitalism is About Love.” (We’ll be posting audio and video of his address later this week.) Jeffrey took some time to join me in...
The Complexities of Sexuality, Religion, and Cake
Last Friday at Religion Dispatches, Kara Loewentheil explored the recent story of a Denver bakery that is being “sued for refusing to bake a homophobic cake.” She calls into question the legitimacy of the request: It’s a snappy inversion of the now-classic example of bakers who refuse to provide wedding cakes for gay marriage mitment ceremonies (or florists who refuse to provide flowers, photographers who refuse to photograph the ceremony, etc.). And that’s probably not an accident;if I were a...
The Super Bowl Hummus Showdown
Taking advantage of every Super Bowl XLIX opportunity to empty a sack full of football tropes, Green America unleashed an email this week, seeking your writer’s help in pressuring Sabra Hummus to discontinue use of genetically modified organisms. The tasty product, distributed by Sabra Dipping Co., LLC and 50-percent owned by PepsiCo Inc., goes well with chips and soft drinks on game day but has raised the ire of anti-GMO activists Green America and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility....
You Can’t Have ‘Settled Science’ Based on Unsettled Data
During his most recent State of the Union address, President Obama talked about climate change and claimed, “2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record.” Obama was basing his statement on a press release by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). According to the NASA data collected from more than 3,000 weather stations around the globe, “The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880.” Climate change skeptics pushed back by questioning the accuracy of the report (more on...
Related Classification
RELIGION & LIBERTY
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
About
Terms and Conditions Privacy policy Cookie Settings Contact Us
Services
Login register
mreligion RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE RELIGION & LIBERTY
Links
zpostcode Recruit weather mreligion Yellowpages sport constellation shopping name game directory literature Word tour furnish Lottery tftnews lyrics News digital car dir Edu Finance
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved