Jeff Sachs has an article titled “Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?” in the latest issue of Scientific American. Much of its content will be familiar to those who have followed Sachs’ work over the last year or so. This is the paragraph that I found most intriguing:

A new kind of development economics needs to emerge, one that is better grounded in science–a “clinical economics” akin to modern medicine. Today’s medical professionals understand that disease results from a vast array of interacting factors and conditions: pathogens, nutrition, environment, aging, individual and population genetics, lifestyle. They also know that one key to proper treatment is the ability to make an individualized diagnosis of the source of illness. Likewise, development economists need better diagnostic skills to recognize that economic pathologies have a wide variety of causes, including many outside the traditional ken of economic practice.