Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World: A Plan for the Poor

About 1.2 billion human beings get by on less than a dollar a day, and in countries like Malawi in southern Africa, HIV-positive citizens are being forced to use their entire $1 a day to buy the antiretroviral medicine that will keep them alive, as global-poverty activist and professor Jeffrey Sachs details in his bestselling book The End of Poverty (Penguin). Sachs, director of Columbia University’s prestigious Earth Institute and special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, has drawn on his experience with those far-flung places to formulate an ambitious nine-step plan that would help
the poorest billion people escape the trap of extreme poverty by 2025. Rocker and debt relief advocate Bono joins Sachs in this talk, a blockbuster beginning to Glucksman Ireland House’s new Moynihan Lecture Series (named after the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan). U2’s lead vox knows a thing or two about Sachs’s work; he penned the foreword to The End of Poverty, a book that’s destined to become required reading for the socially conscious.