Economist and humanitarian Jeffrey Sachs has a great article on Forbes entitled, "The Forbes One Billion."

Some excerpts:

"If journalists spent as much time studying the lives of the poor as they do gazing at the rich, it would help us all keep our heads on straight. We would marvel at a world economy strange enough to sustain such gaps. We'd learn not to blame the rich for the poverty of the poor, but we'd also learn not to blame the poor themselves. Blame is a primitive response. Entrepreneurship is a much better one."

"A century ago the world's richest person, John D. Rockefeller, went to work for the world's poor. Heeding the social gospel of Andrew Carnegie before him, Rockefeller felt that the lasting contribution of his wealth would be to improve the world. And nobody has done it better. He conquered hookworm in the U.S. South. And that was just the start. His foundation fought malaria in Brazil, yellow fever worldwide and even addressed the need for a new science of public health. Most remarkably, perhaps, his foundation shares credit for the green revolution, which sent food yields soaring in India, East Asia and Latin America.

Bill Gates is today's Rockefeller, taking on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in hand-to-hand combat, with new drugs, new vaccines, new diagnostics, new delivery systems. He has persuaded his friend Warren Buffett to put his wealth to the cause. Now, with Carlos Slim Helú's mobile phone fortune pushing him into a virtual tie with Gates for the number one slot in the world wealth ranking, he, too, aims to put billions into the cause of global health. Other big philanthropists are on the wealth lists: George Soros, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and more.

Who else will take up the antipoverty challenge? There are life-and-death problems to occupy the best of the world's creative minds. Who will get credit to Africa's impoverished farmers by creatively linking credit with climate insurance? Who will deliver the Internet to the schools and clinics, safe drinking water to the parched lands of Darfur, solar power to the deserts of Mali, emergency obstetrical care to Tanzania and a new economic start in Haiti, 200 years after independence? These problems require creative and dynamic entrepreneurship to bring the right technologies and delivery systems to bear in a race against time."