Public health and economics are inseparable phenomena. Nowhere demonstrates the reality and potential threat of this union better than Africa, the global epicenter of AIDS and malaria, and by far the world’s poorest continent. The concurrence of these two tragedies, disease and poverty, is no coincidence; even within Africa, poverty and malaria levels are regionally correlated. Worse yet, the arrow of causation runs in both directions: disease depletes human capital and bars the completion of investment projects, while poverty prevents households and governments from purchasing even low-cost medical treatment. And thus disaster in Africa perpetuates itself.

But optimism survives in economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and author of the best-selling End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. In this handbook of economic rescue tactics, Sachs does not settle for the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting “extreme poverty” in half by 2015. Rather, Sachs proposes a grander project than the one envisioned by the MDGs: the global economy must utterly eradicate extreme poverty by 2025. As economists define the term, “extreme poverty” characterizes the financial situation of the roughly one billion people around the world who live on less than one dollar a day. According to Sachs, the modern world should be able to realize this aspiration because “technological progress enables us to meet basic human needs on a global scale and to achieve a margin above base needs unprecedented in history.” The End of Poverty presents a thorough logistical plan for attaining this goal; however, the plan’s dependence on vast contributions from wealthy nations will prevent its success.