Source: Book Review
COMMON WEALTH: Economics for a Crowded Planet
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Penguin Press, 386 pages, $31
Jeffrey Sachs's new book is the author's blueprint for how global society should solve mankind's most pressing problems: climate change, shortage of water, excessive population growth (compared to energy and food capacity of the Earth), diseases (including AIDS), poverty and U.S. foreign policy. The way to solve them is through international co-operation, led by the rich countries, the United States in particular. Epistemologically and practically, the process of solution goes through four stages: We need to have clear objectives, effective technology, clear strategy of implementation and a source of financing.
As the list of problems makes clear, the book is nothing if not ambitious. If we look at the four stages and take Sachs's analysis at its face value, it would seem that for all the most pressing problems that have been identified, the first three stages have already been passed. We are now at the fourth: convincing somebody to provide the funding.
This work by Sachs, the author most recently of The End of Poverty, is advocacy much more than analysis. At times, it will exasperate economists and social scientists with its glib and sweeping statements. It will also call to mind delusions of central planning - conducted at the global scale, more than even Soviet planners envisaged - as when Sachs goes into a detailed listing, complete with price tags and minutely detailed and timed objectives ("Africa could graduate from aid by the year 2025"). It may also bring unpleasant whiffs of the Club of Rome, with its emphasis on the issues of renewable energy and the planet's "carrying capacity."
Some people might see more than a mere coincidence in the fact that such dire warnings seem to regularly appear at the times when the price of oil reaches its historical peaks. The book, in its almost Manichean contrast between the presumably benevolent U.S. policies in the 1950s and 1960s versus those conducted by the current administration, might upset some international relations specialists who would tend to regard the "benevolence" as explained by the serious threat of global communism (both Soviet and Chinese). So now, when this threat is no more, the sole global power reverts to its "normal" and less benevolent posture.
Yet, despite all these qualms (and perhaps a few more), the book impresses by the breadth of its coverage, and the almost breathless tone in which the evidence and statistics as varied as precipitations in Sahel, projected density of car ownership in China in the year 2050, percentage of soil evaporation that can be eliminated by drip irrigation or U.S. expenses for diplomatic functions, are marshalled. And, most of all, in the grandeur of its cause: basically to present a solution to all current, and some of mankind's perennial ills (such as absolute poverty).
Thus, while Sachs is easy to criticize on details, the alternative to his grandiose vision is, essentially, doing nothing. The attitude of facile pessimism is perhaps a comfortable philosophical position, but inactivity is suspect since it tallies so well with the objective of some among the rich who would rather not be bothered by the reality of global poverty and inequality, in the midst of which the prophets of "do-nothing-ism" might find particular resonance, and probably plush funding.
This alternative to Sachs, based on the alleged inefficiency of international aid, is shocking when seen against the background of enormous gaps in wealth and the ability to enjoy a good life that exist in the world today, and the costs, more than modest, needed to eradicate the most obvious injustices, diseases and poverty. Thus, when Sachs writes that the daily Pentagon budget equals the amount that would pay for the anti-malaria needs for all of Africa for five years, one realizes why Sachs needs to provide numbers and quantifiable targets (even if they may or may not prove to be on the mark): The orders of magnitude are such that they shock us and are supposed to propel us into action.
Hectoring the rich world on its inactivity and many broken promises (e.g., the 40-year-old, many-times-repeated and far-from-achieved promise of allocating 0.7 per cent of GDP for development aid) has therefore this objective: showing with how little effort much can be accomplished. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, one could almost argue that Jeffrey Sachs wants to show that never before could so much have been achieved by so little (in terms of sacrifice that it would require from the rich).
Moreover, Sachs argues that this modicum of financial sacrifice is really no sacrifice at all, but better understood as enlightened self-interest; the threats to the way of life of the rich world are not terrorism and religious fundamentalism, but poverty and despair. It is the latter two, Sachs writes, that create the fertile ground for extremism.
Finally, to complete the circle, Sachs argues not only that the cost-benefit analysis of action versus inaction is heavily tilted in favour of the former, but that the identification of the problems and the technological solutions for them are already available.
In this tour de force, for tour de force it is, Sachs undoubtedly succeeds in an objective sense - however treacherous (and subjective) the use of such a term may be. It is not so clear that his appeals will be heeded or heard where it matters most: national governments of the rich countries too preoccupied with their own problems, especially with a looming world recession, and less than anywhere else in the United States, where benevolence and idealism have been superseded by belief in military solutions to practically all the evils, real or imaginary, that beset the world.
This is why Sachs - the director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development at Columbia University, and special economic adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon - devotes an entire chapter to the critique of U.S. foreign policy and its move away from multilateralism. He correctly identifies the key issue: "At the core of our problems today has been the collapse of faith in global problem-solving and a widespread cynical disbelief in global co-operation itself." For this to change, the weltanschauung of the key global actor, the United States, has to change. Sachs therefore criticizes not only the current administration, but also Bill Clinton's, for its failure to seize the vast opportunities opened up with the end of the Cold War. The reader wonders if perhaps a president Obama (never mentioned in the book) might bring back the halcyon days of international co-operation.
But if that does not happen, Sachs has in mind another constituency, thrown up precisely by the massively unequal developments of the last quarter century: the several hundred enormously rich individuals who, if only their annual increment in wealth were used to create an endowment fund, could generate an income flow of $175-billion per year, almost double the development aid currently given by the rich world.
This would be sufficient, Sachs avers, to extend basic health care to all the poor in the world, jump-start a green revolution in Africa and provide drinking water for one billion poor people. Inequities of current globalization, combined with some shift in power away from nation-states, have provided us with a feasible alternative source of funding. In a dialectical twist, could it be that the very inequalities in wealth, so much deplored and resented, might be harnessed to solve the abject poverty of more than a billion people? However skeptical the reader may remain, Sachs's ideas cannot be dismissed out of hand, no more than the grandeur of his vision can be denied.
In a recently published article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Norwegian economist Agnar Sandmo shows how one of the founders of modern economics, Léon Walras, tried to use his influence to get himself nominated for the then-five-year-old Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Prize for economics was non-existent (it would be introduced only in 1969), and Walras argued that by showing the benefits of free international trade, he had powerfully contributed to the cause of world peace. In the event, the prize went to Theodore Roosevelt.
Reading Jeffrey Sachs's newest book, we are at times left in a quandary about whether the author is in the running for the Nobel Prize in economics or in peace. But perhaps it does not matter; either one would be fine, provided some of Sachs's ideas do get implemented, and another militarist dressed in sheep's clothing does not woo the Nobel committee.
Branko Milanovic is lead economist with the World Bank and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
This article originally appeared in Globe & Mail.
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