Poverty of the Soul

At a Hindu ceremony held on April 19th, on the Virginia Tech campus, 33 candles were lighted, including one for Mr. Cho, who shot himself after his deadly killing spree.

“He also was a lost soul,” said Kusum Singh, who helped organize the Hindu ceremony to memorialize G. V. Loganathan, 52, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Minal Panchal, 26, an architecture student from Mumbai, India.

Is it simply the lack of love and belongingness that allows extreme psychological poverty to arise in some cases, which leads to crimes such as murders and mass killings? Do happy and loving people ever go on a killing spree? Extreme psychological poverty exists in all nations - and perhaps even more so in richer nations, as they get obsessed with material well-being.

The End of Poverty

In contrast to the failed small-self "structural adjustment" economic programmes of the World Bank and the IMF, Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a new paradigm of Clinical Economics based on his work in Bolivia, Poland, India, China, and Africa. In his book, The End of Poverty, he offers big-self solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that affect the world's poorest nations. This book is one of my all time favorites.

In April 2004, and again in April 2005, Professor Sachs was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time.