Nicholas Kristof

The challenges of global poverty are getting more attention lately, but helping people is far harder than it looks. For example, humanitarian aid is often used in effect to finance military spending, so that about 40 percent of African arms spending may inadvertently be paid for by aid donors. Still, people are getting better at addressing the challenges of global poverty, and one of the most lucid guides to this terrain is Collier's landmark book, The Bottom Billion. Collier, a former World Bank chief economist who is now at Oxford University, is a believer in foreign aid while acknowledging all the