Paul Polak (1933–2019)

“Out of Poverty” is a workshop; it’s an evangelical seminar and an infomercial. It’s subdivided ruthlessly. It’s full of lists. It’s incredibly repetitive. There is absolutely no way to read it at an academic remove because Paul Polak is beating his readers over the head with the urgent simplicity of his thinking and with the exasperation of a pragmatist who is regularly accused of idealism.

Polak wants to encourage a modest paradigm shift in development. He’s convinced that donations will not alleviate poverty; that a country’s economic growth will not necessarily help the poor and that big businesses cannot be trusted to do so either. He champions design for the other 90%--the increasingly popular effort to engineer products for the billions of people making do with about $1 a day. And he is a powerful advocate of small-scale thinking: the one-acre farm is great: grow pumpkins on your roof and a raspberry patch! He wants to create wafer thin profit margins; but to spread those margins across a billion people. Why not?

Polak is giving it away. “Out of Poverty” repeatedly challenges entrepreneurs to take his ideas and to profit by them. Why isn’t anyone making cheap eye glasses like he proposes? How about his treadle pumps and low-cost drip irrigation systems? Or his lockers for homeless people?

He’s convincing. Whenever my own professional work overlaps with what he discusses, I’ll pick up his book and make sure I’m paying attention to his advice. Others in the development community will do their jobs better if they do the same—especially those people involved in agriculture and subsistence farming.

And if you are far removed from the developing world and from development work in general, this is still a useful book for orienting yourself in such matters. Polak makes sure that his readers all know what he would like for them to do upon completing “Out of Poverty.” Such clarity of purpose makes for a rather graceless and pushy book; but the man’s got rock solid ideas.… (more)