Rethinking Jeffrey Sachs and the ‘Big Five’: new proposals for the end of poverty

While Jeffrey Sachs has done well to highlight the roles of colonialism, the Cold War and the ‘ongoing political and economic plunder’ in creating Africa’s poverty, Jason Hickel argues that Sachs’ ‘Big Five’ solutions are rooted in the same system that he seeks to criticise: ‘The problem here is that Sachs calls on us to think within a paradigm of aid when we should be thinking within a paradigm of justice.’ Instead, then, Hickel proposes an alternative big five based on this ‘paradigm of justice’: Forgiving debt, protecting resource commons, installing an international minimum wage, democratisation of international institutions and reducing the greenhouse emissions of the West and China. Hickel notes, however, that ‘Implementing these changes would require enormous political will and moral courage… [these solutions] would run up against Western economic interests, and would most likely cut into the profits of those who presently pride themselves on their philanthropy.’