But also, Sachs does not argue that aid itself brings countries out of poverty. No one I know of thinks that you would flood some area with so much aid that they would no longer be poor. But he is saying that aid helps build the conditions for a country to bring itself out of poverty. And he does discuss this in his book when he talks about the “green revolution” and basically discusses the need for World Bank type projects to bring countries out of the “poverty trap”. It is not a matter of aid bring people out of poverty, but of making it easier for people to bring themselves out of poverty.

On the other hand, the problem of progress in the third world is similar to the IT problem of deploying a new-and-improved technology, in the sense that both are chicken-and-egg problems. To educate the people, you need to lose the dictator; to lose the dictator, you need to educate the people. To sell your new collaborative social networking service, you need to demonstrate that lots of people are using it. Yet somehow, with the aid of money and incremental deployment, these chicken-and-egg problems do get solved, sometimes.

Economists are still arguing about these issues, and they don’t agree about them any more than they agree about most topics. There’s a broad range of opinion about the effectiveness of aid, with believers like Professor Sachs at one end and skeptics like Professor Easterly at the other. Most are somewhere in the middle.

More broadly, however, aid can be effective even if it doesn’t boost economic growth. Last fall when I was traveling through the remote lands of eastern Niger, miles from nowhere, I dropped in on a clinic in the town of Zinder and found a heavily pregnant thirty-seven-year-old woman named Ramatou who was groaning and suffering convulsions; she was losing her eyesight. The doctors were more interested in me than in her, but they said she was about to fall into a coma from eclampsia, a common condition in Africa that kills pregnant women but is essentially unknown in America. (In developed countries it is detected early, as pre-eclampsia, and then treated so that it never develops into full-fledged eclampsia.)

Cockroaches skittered on the floor underneath Ramatou, as the doctors wheeled her into the small operating theater. The surgery was primitive but could not have been more effective: thirty minutes later, the doctor delivered a baby boy, and an hour later the mother was conscious and recovering. That clinic, financed by the UN Population Fund (whose funding the Bush administration has cut because of its support for China’s family planning program) and by Nigeria’s aid program (poor countries are donors, too), had just saved two lives before my eyes. I don’t know whether that aid will boost economic growth in Niger, but no one watching that drama could doubt that financing the clinic was money well spent.

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This is the “second” Poland, a diaspora of 800,000 Poles estimated by officials here to have left the country since it joined the European Union in May 2004. The exodus is believed to be one of the largest migrations by Europeans since the 1950s, when a wave of Irish crossed the Atlantic to escape poverty.

But in Poland, this huge movement of people has created a labor shortage so severe that the government may not be able to spend the money that is due to begin arriving in January from the European Union for projects like improving roads and the water supply.