Audio by Nina Munk in News Archive

The Idealist

After six years of research, journalist Nina Munk has written The Idealist, a book doccumenting the efforts of Jeffrey Sachs in global sustainable development. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University and the director of the Earth Institute. His brainchild, the Millennium Villages Project, is meant to put his economic theories into action to lift various African communities out of an endless cycle of poverty--the "poverty trap."Munk, however, has a sharply critical view of the Millenium Villiages Project, predicting that while the project has not yet conclusively failed, "when we look back 10 years from now, it will clearly be perceived as a failure.”