Jeffrey Sach's Intellectual Poverty

David Frum feels bad about it, but he piles on Jeffrey Sach's The End of Poverty:

Sachs envisions a future in which the governments of poor countries and the UN will together be granted authority to direct massive tides of capital to industries ranging from health care to energy. He believes, for example, that technology companies have invested insufficient funds in photovoltaic cells and improved battery technology. Under
his plan, the UN would correct this and other errors by putting money where he believes it should go. A half-century of failure does not discourage him.

Sachs similarly shrugs off the threat posed by bureaucracy and corruption, two forces that have crippled plans like his in the past. This central plan, he pledges, will be carefully constructed so as to minimize such structural problems. How so? Pretty clearly, Sachs envisions that the big bold planner will be someone much like himself—and he is unshakably confident that this godlike figure will get right what so many lesser minds before him have gotten wrong.

Sach’s confidence on this score would be a little more infectious if he showed more awareness that his preferred methods had failed in the past. Unfortunately, on the evidence of this book, the history he knows best is his own autobiography. More than half its length is devoted to the story of Sach’s career, detailing his successes and explaining away the failures (none of which, one learns, was in any way his responsibility).