Why can Peter Burgess, the author, write this book? What experience does the writer have that makes this book possible?

As a young accountant I did a review of the costing of the Kariba Dam project while I was working with Coopers and Lybrand. I was young and naive enough to want to get it right no matter what, and rocked the boat when I concluded that the World Bank estimate was only about half what it needed to be. The World Bank engineers had made good cost estimates based on the static information about costs as they were now ... but nobody seemed to have adjusted anything for the changes that surely would take place when a project of the magnitude of the Kariba dam was in progress. My calculations suggested that the actual cost would be twice what the World Bank was planning. Because I was part of Coopers and Lybrand, the firm's name carried weight and substantial changes to the estimates were made at the Bank, and the project was eventually a considerable success. Even though I was very young, within Coopers and Lybrand I had credibility because I had already worked as an engineer in the factory environment and done production costing work prior to joining the firm, and understood economics from my academic work at Cambridge.

I had a meeting scheduled in the center of Lagos at Western House, at the time one of the most prestigious buildings in Lagos. Two kids were dead just outside the building. Poverty and death in what was now a very rich oil producing nation. The juxtaposition of these things was something I had never expected. Up to then, in my youthful naiveté, I thought that money solved problems. This was a wake up call. Money is not enough.

I started doing World Bank consultancy in 1978. One of my memories of this work is being driven in a Mercedes Benz through the center of a city in Kerala in South India. The streets were crowded. We were stuck in traffic and pedestrian throngs. I could feel hate from the people surrounding the car. They were well justified in their emotions. It was very uncomfortable. Next day ... because I was a “World Bank Consultant” ... I was asked to make a brief presentation at a local Rotary meeting and was on a panel with a local Catholic priest. Our World Bank project was a multi-hundred million dollar project ... which my analysis suggested would do almost no sustainable good ... and the priest had almost no money and was doing quite incredible work that was saving lives and mitigating misery. I was embarrassed ... but did my best “cover up”!

During the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, one of my consulting colleagues became very upset about my criticism of the development process and the results it was achieving. As consultants, we were doing very well. The more that development failed, the more consultants earned. However, after working with me several weeks, and seeing the financial analysis and economic value analysis that I was doing, he understood why I was so very critical.

When I read Professor Jeffrey Sach’s book “The End of Poverty – Economic Possibilities for our Time” in May 2005, as I was in what I thought would be the the final rewrite of the manuscript for this book. I realized how well qualified I am to write this book. Compared to Professor Sachs I have a broader education and training, a longer and wider experience, and a very different perspective of the problems.