“Thousands Died in Africa Yesterday” was the title of a recent New York Times op/ed piece written by Jeffrey Sachs. He’s arguably the most influential economist in the world, and he’s helped nations like Bolivia and Poland get their economies on track. In short, he’s my hero. In his recent book, “The End to Poverty,” he delivers compelling and practical arguments for the steps needed to eliminate extreme poverty in the world, and he’s right about both the urgency and feasibility of promoting economic development in impoverished nations.

I consider myself “aware” because I’ve been somewhat exposed to poverty. I vividly remember meeting an Appalachian couple who couldn’t afford to get married because their welfare benefits would be reduced. And I still think about the teenage girl I met in Peru who wanted nothing more than to marry a man with a battery-powered boom box, the latest status symbol on an island too poor to enjoy electricity. But these isolated cases I’ve encountered are not among the truly horrendous instances of poverty, typified by the swollen-bellied children the media generally ignores. They are not what Sachs labels “extreme poverty,” a state in which one billion people live. One billion.

Here on campus, we most frequently talk about unemployment and poverty within our own borders. Many of us reach out to the poor in Ann Arbor and neighboring Detroit. And we should. But just because it’s easier to feel the problems of poverty in our own communities does not mean our world ends there. With the spread of globalization, the lines between nations are blurring, and our world is expanding. In other places, there is a crisis of extreme poverty that is far more pressing but also far easier to ignore.

I’m concerned about union workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing. But I’m even more concerned about families who can’t even subsist in rural Cambodia or the arid savannahs of Africa.

I’ve heard complaints that the United States ignores its own poor in lieu of international interventions. But there does not need to be an international versus domestic tradeoff; rather, it’s guns versus butter. There is a big difference in whether actions abroad are military or humanitarian, whether the United States is spending $500 billion a year in Iraq or a measly $16 billion a year to help the world’s poorest nations, as Sachs estimates. To fully fund development efforts, he asserts that it would still cost the United Steates only $70 billion — far cheaper and more efficient than present military actions, and as a bonus, nobody dies when you give them bed nets. A real commitment to economic development would bring stability to impoverished nations and benefit the United States with increased global security and trade. Everybody wins.

But in order to end poverty, at home or abroad, we must push our government. Organizations like one.org really impress me; they are making a valiant grassroots effort to initiate a top-down change, requesting that the United States commit 1 percent of its federal budget to combating extreme poverty.

I don’t like economic inequality, but I can at least find a framework in which it makes some sense. I can’t, however, rationalize the presence of extreme poverty in any way. It doesn’t matter if you’re freezing on the streets of Detroit or Moscow. Whether it’s school uniforms or a $1.20 malaria cure that you can’t afford for your children, it’s still sickening. The statistics are staggering and unnecessary to repeat, but it doesn’t matter any more or less if it’s one person or several million who are dying of poverty.

It’s a lot more comfortable to focus on the poverty we can see. But the links of globalization bind us so tightly to the international community that the plight of those who earn less than $1 a day is no less important than the homeless man who asks you for a few dollars. We have the resources to do both: to help those close to us and to extend the 0.7 percent of our GNP needed to end extreme poverty worldwide. The beautiful thing about saving the world is that sometimes it can be done, but our government won’t do a thing until we care. As students, we don’t have to oversimplify and naïvely clamor for the vague notion of global change. We can be those sign-waving activists who actually understand the problem and demand that we be heard, because extreme poverty is completely fixable.

Beam is an LSA junior and the Daily’s associate editorial page editor.