Development practitioners tend to be an extremely pragmatic lot. They usually spend less time pondering the philosophical underpinnings of development policies than they do trying to comply with them. It’s not that they don’t care about philosophy; it’s just that funds tend to flow to the most compliant agencies, so there is a strong incentive to channel one’s mental energies into solving practical concerns. My colleagues were no different, and I strove for years to conform to that expectation myself. Yet other influential books continued to be published in the wake of Sachs’ industry-shaking work, such as Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion and Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, which provided yet other prescriptions for the road out of poverty than either Sachs or Easterly had proposed, and this proliferation of sometimes-conflicting advice prevented me from detaching myself fully from development philosophy. Even as I learned to dutifully jump through the hoops that development funding agencies required of their implementing partners, I found myself continually drawn back to philosophical questions such as: Which prescription is right? Is there such a thing as a universally ‘right’ prescription? Is poverty really defeatable?

实践者倾向于非常务实的发展。他们花在思考发展政策的哲学基础上的时间通常少于试图遵守这些政策的时间。这并不是说他们不关心哲学；只是资金倾向于流向最合规的机构，因此有一种强烈的动机来引导人们的精神力量去解决实际问题。我的同事们也没什么不同，我自己也努力了好几年才符合这种期望。然而，其他有影响力的书籍在萨克斯震撼行业的著作之后继续出版，比如保罗·科利尔的《最底层的十亿》和丹比萨·莫约的《死亡的援助》，它们为摆脱贫困的道路提供了比萨克斯和伊斯特利提出的更多的处方，这种有时相互矛盾的建议的泛滥，使我无法完全脱离发展哲学。就在我学会尽职尽责地跳出发展筹资机构对其执行伙伴的要求时，我发现自己不断地被拉回到哲学问题上，比如：哪个处方是正确的？有没有一种“普遍正确”的处方？贫穷真的可以战胜吗？