Last week, President Barack Obama nominated Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth College, as president of the World Bank, the international development finance institution.

Dr. Kim's nomination came out of the blue. By long tradition, the World Bank job goes to a senior U.S. official or financial technocrat. The job entails managing a huge bureaucracy and collaborating with the International Monetary Fund, the international financial stability organization.

The World Bank issues bonds backed by contributions from 187 nations ($1.9 billion this year from the United States) to provide low-interest loans to developing countries without access to traditional capital markets.

Kim's expertise lies elsewhere. South Korean-born and Iowa-raised, he is a physician, a medical anthropologist and a cofounder of Partners in Health, which brings advanced health treatment to horribly poor parts of the world.

PIH was founded on the belief that the poor deserve the same access to first-class medical care as the affluent, even when it meant that Jim Kim and his partner, Paul Farmer, had to walk out of a Boston hospital with $92,000 worth of advanced antibiotics for multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis for patients in the slums of Lima, Peru.

Kim and Farmer did that in the late 1990s (a donor eventually repaid the hospital) because they saw no reason why patients with MDR tuberculosis in Peru should die when patients in Boston with the same disease might live. It was what they called an "AMC," an area of moral clarity.

In "Mountains Beyond Mountains," a 2003 biography of Farmer, Tracy Kidder describes how Farmer, working in the mountains of Haiti, had borrowed a social justice concept from the "liberation theology" preached by Catholic priests in Latin America: Jesus taught a "preferential option for the poor."

For Farmer and Kim, this became a way to make decisions: When in doubt, always choose the "O for the P," the option for the poor.

After Partners in Health proved it could eradicate MDR tuberculosis in the slums, Kim told Farmer he wanted to try working on a broader scale, in international health politics. Kidder quotes Kim:

"Political work is interesting to me and it has to be done. I prefer it to taking care of patients. It's O for the P on an international scale."

Kim moved on to head the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS program. He developed programs in global health equity and human rights at Harvard Medical School. He received a MacArthur "genius grant." He took the Dartmouth job in 2009, hoping to train other idealistic young people and expand the influence of the Dartmouth Health Atlas, which examines why up to 30 percent of the money spent on health care in the United States is wasted.

Can a man with an O for the P and little patience for bureaucratic pettifoggery succeed at the World Bank? Kim knows first-hand that international development often benefits the powers that be, not the poor. He knows that projects in the Third World go begging while projects in emerging nations like China and India get loans.

Developing nations have their own candidate for the World Bank job, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank official. Oddly, this outsider candidate has traditionalist credentials. Obama's insider choice has revolutionist credentials. International development could use a revolution.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

DIST. BY CREATORS.COM