杰弗里•萨克斯非洲扶贫试验破产之谜

    尼娜•芒克的新书《理想主义者：杰弗里•萨克斯和他对消除贫困的探索》明确了一件事：消除贫困并不是件容易的事。即使对萨克斯来说也是一样，这位卓有名望而且不屈不挠的经济学家2005年时曾在自己的著作《终结贫困》中声称这个问题可以得到解决。他表示，借助深思熟虑的规划以及来自发达国家更多的一点帮助，我们甚至到2025年就能消除贫困。

    但萨克斯的探索——他在撒哈拉以南非洲地区的少数村庄进行了实践，即千禧村项目（MVP）——似乎处处碰壁。一处牲畜市场在开办两个月之后即遭到抛弃；村民把（旨在预防疟疾的）新蚊帐用在了山羊身上；运水的驴子死掉了；医院的发电机发生了故障；万众期待的香蕉粉和菠萝市场永远未能成形；而且，由于那里没有市场或本地存储设施，当地的玉米虽然借助化肥和高产种子获得了大丰收，但最终却喂了老鼠。

    在其它情况下，这些小失败可以算作汲取经验教训；当你在几乎没有得到开发的地方尝试改善人们的生活，你要做好心理准备，遭遇一系列挫折和错综复杂的问题。但萨克斯带着数百万美元来到非洲，拥有权贵人士的关系网，却很少考虑在他之前援助社区所做的努力，所以，他的失败给读者留下的印象不仅仅是令人失望，而且是活该。

    芒克是《名利场》（Vanity Fair）杂志的特约编辑，以前还曾经是《财富》的专栏作家，她将一个6个月的杂志报道任务扩展为这个长达6年的书籍项目。芒克从未告诉读者她自己对于萨克斯的真实看法，直到这本书的倒数第二段。她不必那样做，她的报告生动地讲述了一个狂妄自大的人的故事。萨克斯是一个具有吸引力的人物，他在之前取得过大胆的功绩——例如，他在30多岁的时候说服玻利维亚、波兰和俄罗斯的领导人对他们国家的经济实施“休克疗法”——但芒克明确写道，尽管萨克斯拥有不凡的技能和智利，但他承诺在短短5年内让数十个非洲村庄脱离贫困这件事（他计划在非洲大陆推广这种模式）依然远远超出了他的能力所及。

    芒克是一位优秀的作家，拥有铺陈额外生动细节的能力，她成功让可能很乏味的主题——对外援助的政治；乌干达马托基（matoke，煮过的新鲜香蕉——译注）市场的复杂细节；非政府组织在抗疟疾工作上的明争暗斗——形成一本十分生动、有时甚至显得饶有趣味的书。

    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. A livestock market is abandoned two months after it opens. Villagers use their new mosquito nets (distributed to prevent malaria) on goats. Water-carrying donkeys drop dead. Hospital generators break down. Much-anticipated markets for banana flour and pineapple never materialize. And, because there is no market or local storage facilities, a bumper crop of maize—thanks to fertilizer and high-yield seeds—goes to the rats.

    In any other case, these small failings might be chalked up as lessons learned; expected setbacks and complications in trying to improve lives in hard and barely developed places. But for Sachs, who arrived in Africa with millions of dollars, a rolodex to the rich and powerful, and little regard for the efforts of the aid community that came before him, readers are left with the sense that these unimpressive results are more than disappointing. They're a deserved comeuppance.

    Munk, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and former Fortune writer, stretched a six-month magazine assignment into this six-year book project. She never tells readers exactly how she feels about Sachs until the second to last paragraph of the book. She doesn't have to. Her reporting yields a rich parable of one man's hubris. Sachs is a fascinating figure who has achieved audacious things before—like convincing leaders of Bolivia, Poland and Russia to administer "shock therapy" to their economies while in his thirties—but Munk makes clear his promise to pull a dozen African villages out of poverty in just five years (a model he plans to scale across the continent) is beyond even his considerable skill and intellect.

    A fine writer with a gift for deploying spare, vivid detail, Munk overcomes the burden of what could be duller-than-dirt subject matter—the politics of foreign aid; the ins and outs of Uganda's matoke market; NGO infighting over anti-malaria efforts—into a lively and at times, quite funny book.

    芒克的叙述将她在实地的所见所闻编织在一起——她主要观察了两座村庄——这些见闻通常是很多千禧村项目工作人员的辛勤努力，以及萨克斯高来高去的足迹，他会乘坐装有空调的装甲SUV在非洲巡游。这种并列对比的反差并不小，而萨克斯本人也是一样。这本书记录了一个场景，在萨克斯走下飞抵达累斯萨拉姆的航班时，他冲着一位乘客（一位寄生虫专家）大喊大叫——“这些人的死亡是你一手造成的！”——因为后者反对他发起的免费发放蚊帐的活动。跟这个地区的其他援助工作者一样，这位寄生虫学家花了几年时间发展起一门私人的蚊帐生意，他并不希望免费分发蚊帐毁了自己的努力。

    Her narrative weaves together scenes from the field—she focuses on two villages— usually chronicling the many travails of MVP staff, and scenes trailing the jet-set Sachs, who rides around Africa in armored, air-conditioned SUVs. The juxtaposition is not subtle but neither is Sachs, who, at one point in the book, while disembarking a flight in Dar es Salaam, shouts down a fellow passenger (a parasitologist)—"These deaths are on your hands!"— for opposing his campaign to distribute mosquito nets. The parasitologist, like other aid workers in the region, had spent recent years developing a private mosquito net industry and didn't want to undo the work by giving nets out for free.