When Jeffrey Sachs gave the first of his BBC Reith Lectures at the Royal Society in London a year ago, he was confident that there, in the bosom of the Enlightenment, with Isaac Newton’s portrait staring down at him, his message about our ability to overcome the world’s problems would go down well.
But when he finished he was astonished to be assailed by cries of ”No we can’t!” No, the world will never cooperate! No, humanity will never be reasonable! No, we can’t bridge the divides!
”I was taken aback,” says Sachs. ”I thought that, in this place at least, there would be a unanimous approval. This was the elite of UK society. But there was a measure of pessimism that I found frankly amazing.”
The story is a sharp illustration of Sachs’s peculiar role in life. He has become a sort of pantomime dame of global politics. As the chorus rises around the world of ”Oh no, we can’t!”, his riposte grows louder too: ”Oh yes, we can!” Yes we can lift Africa out of the poverty trap and stabilise its population at sustainable levels.
Yes, we can continue to enjoy rising living standards and longevity. Yes, we can avert catastrophe by finding new technologies to combat climate change.
Were these protestations coming from anyone else, they might be dismissed as the ravings of Widow Twankey. But Sachs has the intellectual muscle to be taken seriously. He has been called the most important economist in the world. He has worked in more than 100 countries and advised governments across Latin America and the old Soviet Union.
More recently he has turned his attention to the major crises engulfing the planet — from Aids in Africa to water wars. He directed the UN’s Millennium Project under Kofi Annan.
Bono calls him ”my professor”, observing that ”when this man gets going, he’s more like a Harlem preacher than a Boston bookworm”.
In the flesh, though, Sachs resembles neither of those archetypes. Rather he comes across as a bushy-tailed graduate who, despite his 53 years, is as eager to launch himself at a problem as a twenty-something straight out of college.
We are sitting in his elegant but sparsely furnished townhouse on the edge of Central Park, Manhattan, where he lives with his paediatrician wife and three children and, as we talk, he radiates an infectious enthusiasm. His new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin Press), has the same quality — it bursts with ideas and is suffused with what can only be described as irrepressible optimism.
So where does this optimism come from? ”From observation and experience,” he replies in true Enlightenment style. ”Maybe by temperament also. I see the possibility of success. But I am clear. This is about choice. It’s not about the blind working of the market or the miracles of science. It’s about a decision.”
Sachs is a great believer in breaking things down, to reducing a daunting problem down to its smaller and more manageable parts.
He applies the same logic to himself, saying his optimism has two components: a belief in the ”ability of science to allow people to live prosperously and sustainably on the planet and an optimism about the ability of people to cooperate across cultures, religions, language”. He pauses, then adds: ”Both of these ideas are under attack.”
Sachs can point to practical examples of what he means. His favourite is the prescription of antiretroviral medicines in Africa. ”I remember a decade ago finding out that it was technically possible to treat very poor people with Aids using antiretrovirals. I asked my colleagues if this could be done and the answer was ‘Yes, why not? Come and I’ll show you.’ So I took that knowledge and put it to use.” Problem. Scientific hypothesis.
Practical solution. Then, working with the UN and other agencies, implementation.
”As late as 2001 there wasn’t one African — not one human being — on a donor-supported programme to receive antiretrovirals. Looking back, it was shocking the things that were said. The head of the US aid agency said it wouldn’t work as Africans couldn’t tell the time.
”But now there are close to two million Africans on antiretrovirals.”
Sachs’s life has followed an extraordinary trajectory. Brought up in Michigan, he took Harvard by storm, joining its economics faculty while still an undergraduate and being made a full professor by 29. He spent more than 20 years there before moving to Columbia University in New York, where he is director of the Earth Institute. There he has taken on a mission that makes tackling Aids in Africa look timid. His book is a call to action on the three great challenges facing the world — overpopulation, extreme poverty and global warming.
Confronted by that vision of apocalypse, you feel an affinity with the Royal Society audience: ”Oh no, we can’t!”
Sachs’s response is, well, Sachsian. He breaks each problem down, analyses it and sets out practical solutions which he says are achievable and would cost the world remarkably little — a mere 2% to 3% of total income.
”We are liable to be overwhelmed by the immensity of what is going on, even paralysed. It’s a paradox. We could do enormous damage to ourselves — and are on a path to do that — and yet the cost of finding an alternative direction is extraordinarily modest.”
Environmentalists protest that Sachs wants to have his cake and eat it. He wants economic growth to continue, but he also wants to avert disastrous climate change born of economic activity. To which he replies, quite unashamedly, that he believes in the power of technology and human ingenuity. Take climate change. He sees great hope in carbon sequestration as a possible way of reducing CO2 levels and, if that fails, solar energy may step into the breach.
In any case he doesn’t want to set the clock back: ”Is it wrong that fossil fuels had this massive climate effect and therefore we never should have used coal to fire a steam engine two centuries ago? I don’t think so. Do technologies have unexpected consequences and side-effects? Of course. But then you need to readjust.”
But the sharpest assault has come from Naomi Klein, who, in her new book The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books), lays into Sachs with gusto. She claims the taming of Bolivian hyperinflation in the 1970s, an act of economic wizardry that helped make Sachs’s name, was achieved only through government repression that she calls ”a kind of junta lite”.
Later, in Poland, the free-market shock therapy he encouraged caused a full-blown depression, she contends.
”Well, come on, let’s have some sense of proportion,” is Sachs’s slightly peeved reply when I put Klein’s case to him. ”Poland ended up the most successful recovery, with robust democratic institutions, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Oppression in Bolivia? That’s just factually wrong. There was no loss of life. When she called it Pinochet lite — I mean, Pinochet killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Bolivia was a 30-day emergency rule under the constitution at a time of 50 000% inflation.”
But Sachs agrees with Klein that the US abdicated responsibility after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He says it felt as though he was shouting in the middle of a hurricane as his recommendations for debt cancellation and emergency loans for Russia were not listened to by the defence secretary in George Bush Sr’s administration, Dick Cheney.
Which brings us to Sachs’s greatest complaint. His book argues that the administration of George Bush Jr has stood in the way of progress on all the most critical fronts: from family planning to aid in Africa and action against climate change. Instead, it has pursued a relentlessly militaristic path in which the US now spends almost as much money on warfare as the rest of the world combined.
As you read Common Wealth, in which he piles case upon case in which Bush has said no to global action, it dawns that the US president’s most damaging legacy will not be the Iraq war, or Kyoto, or any other single decision, but more generally his pervasive sponsorship of what Sachs calls ”negativism as a state of mind”. Bush has encouraged the chorus of ”No, we can’t!” It might distress many of them to hear this, but the audience at the Royal Society are, in this regard, his disciples.
Sachs admits we are headed towards a cliff but, not surprisingly, remains relentlessly upbeat. Though he won’t declare which Democratic candidate he is supporting, he hails ”the wonder of the American constitution.
”We will have a new president on January 20 2009, around noon, and this will give us the chance for a fresh start.” And then he offers a quote by poet Wallace Stevens: ”After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.” — Â