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.

    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。

    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.

    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。

    Though well-intentioned, Sachs comes across as prickly, dismissive, and supremely arrogant. Most damningly, he appears disconnected from the on-the-ground realities of MVP, the efforts of his staff, and particularly the lives he's trying to improve. By Munk's telling, Sachs barely spends any time in the villages, but rather blows through the region, being shuttled in those armored SUVS, between high-end hotels and the offices of African leaders. He drops into villages, only long enough to receive a hero's welcome—a performance, Munk makes clear—from villagers who are keen to keep the money coming. Meanwhile "the great professor"—as one initially smitten staff member calls him—resists external evaluation efforts of MVP, and Munk finds evidence the organization's reports are leaving out bad news.

    While Sachs and his short temper provide the book's juiciest bits, Munk effectively draws readers into the stories of the earnest, committed, and (like Munk) increasingly disillusioned group of Africans who work as MVP field staff. They have impossible jobs; tasked with managing the on-the-ground situation while keeping up with the constantly changing and increasingly pie-in-the-sky orders that come down from the New York-based MVP headquarters. While one village coordinator is being asked to write multiple drafts of a business plan for small-scale milk production, his village is facing famine and a drought so severe that an angry mob beats the driver of a water truck.

    Moments like this can leave readers feeling awfully bleak about the state of foreign aid and the prospects of ever overcoming poverty. Munk does a good job conveying the complexities of development work and the system of trade-offs involved in foreign aid.

    Yet for all of his faults and MVP's failures, Munk is a bit hard on Sachs. More than once, she offers examples of progress in the MVP villages —drops in mortality and malaria rates; improved school attendance—yet these notable feats feel overshadowed by the steady drumbeat of small failures. Sachs remains one of a very few fierce, public advocates for addressing global poverty. Munk's portrait is so stinging, it's easy to forget that fact. Certainly, as a figurehead who commands considerable attention and resources, Sachs deserves the scrutiny. He also deserves more credit than he gets here—but only slightly more. By the end of her book, even Sachs seems humbled, and admits that while things are better in these few villages, a global solution for poverty still a long way off.

    虽然用意良善，但萨克斯给人的印象是易怒、傲慢以及超级自负。最令人沮丧的是，萨克斯似乎脱离了千禧村项目实地的现实，脱离了他手下工作人员的努力，尤其脱离了他试图改善其生活的那些人们。在芒克的叙述中，萨克斯几乎不会花时间待在村子里，而是乘坐那种装甲SUV到处穿梭，只会停留在高档酒店和非洲国家领导人的办公室之间。萨克斯在村庄的时间只够他接受村民们给予的英雄式欢迎，这些村民都热衷于得到资金援助——芒克明确表示，这是一种表演。与此同时，“伟大的教授”——这是最初被萨克斯迷住的一位工作人员对他的叫法——拒绝外界对千禧村项目进行评估。而且芒克还发现证据，证明这个组织自身的报告存在报喜不报忧的行为。

    尽管萨克斯和他暴躁的脾气为这本书提供了最有料的内容，但芒克也带领读者认识了那些认真负责、身为千禧村项目工作人员的非洲人，他们（跟芒克一样）对这个项目越来越失望。他们被授以不可能完成的工作，既要负责处理实地的状况，又要遵从朝令夕改、不切实际的指令，而这些指令都来自千禧村项目位于纽约的总部。一位村庄协调员被要求为一份建立小规模奶制品工厂的商业计划书撰写多份草案，而他所在的村庄正面临非常严重的饥荒和干旱，以至于愤怒的人们袭击了一位水车的司机。

    这样的时刻可能会让读者感到，对外援助的状态以及战胜贫困的前景非常黯淡。芒克完成了一项出色的工作，她向读者传达了开发工作以及对外援助中所涉及的复杂的制衡体系。

    尽管萨克斯存在过错，尽管千禧村项目遭遇了种种失败，但芒克对他还是有些苛刻了。芒克在书中不止一次地提到了千禧村项目村庄取得进展的实例——死亡率和疟疾患病率下降了；就学率提高了——然而这些显著的成就让人感觉被那些小失败的声音所掩盖了。萨克斯仍然是解决全球贫困问题极少数激烈的公共倡导者之一，芒克描绘的形象很是刺痛人心，以至于让人很容易忘记这个事实。当然，作为一个博得大量关注和资源的精神领袖，萨克斯理应接受这种审视。但他也理应得到比这书中描写更多的认可——但只是稍微更多一些。在这本书的末尾，甚至连萨克斯本人也显露出谦卑的姿态。他承认，虽然这少数几个村庄的情况有所改善，但找到战胜贫困的全球性解决方案仍然有一段很长的路要走。（财富中文网）

    译者：王灿均