Escobar and Sachs Article

Both the Escobar and Sachs articles focus on development and standard of living in poor nations around the world. However, each author writes with very different objectives. Escobar focuses more towards development as an overreaching concept, and citing specific human-related problems related to industrialization in poorer countries. Sachs focuses on development as well, however instead he takes more of an environmentalist view. He does not necessarily argue against development flat out, but he emphasizes how little actual economic progress many poor nations have made while this development has harmed the environment creating yet another poverty-causing factor.

Sach makes an interesting argument about the "race for development." He argues that the southern countries of the world are very underdeveloped compared to those of the north, and with no "finish line" for development, the northern nations continue to overdevelop while those in the south fall even farther behind, as shown by the increasing disparities in GDP.

In Escobar's article, he discusses how development in the post WWII world was overseen by a large group of experts who desired the construction of societies in impoverished countries based on models that would fit pre-existing notions about what a modern society should be. However, as history has show, this rarely worked. This un-relenting quest for development led rulers to take even more measures to control their populations. Sachs agrees with Escobar here, he believe that these impoverished nations should focus on native ideologies of development, instead of paying attention to imported western ideas about how their country should be run.

Both authors generally agree that the current strategy of development is not a successful one. However, compared to Escobar, Sachs advocates a much more environmental, "constrained, sustain development" type of agenda. While Escobar, with a much more realist opinion, says that it's not "sustainable growth" that is the issue, but that there is often not any growth at all and a continual inferiority of the third world and a little economic mobility for the worlds greatly impoverished.