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“We have to do the things we’ve never done before.” If you can read through all the flattery of
this profile piece in the January issue of Scientific American, there is some
interesting information and comments about sustainable development and maybe a
few other things to earmark, depending upon your interests. I remember that this man has a mixed reputation
on FW. In the highlight box of the magazine article,
where the editor used the phrase ‘Selling Science’ in large font, it says,
“Early interest in economics sprang from the tension between capitalism and
socialism. Sachs says, “Economics
answers the most fundamental questions” and “the rich are already rich enough
to be able to end poverty.” Karen Watters Cole Science
to Save the World
Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs
thinks the science and technology of resource-rich nations can abolish poverty,
sickness and other woes of the developing world. By David Appell In a borrowed office on the 16th floor of the United Nations
Building 2, Jeffrey D. Sachs is on the telephone when I arrive. Although he began working in New York City
only eight weeks ago, he seems right at home. He calls the city a unique base of operations. “I think New York is one of the few
places in the world where one could find the breadth, the scale and the depth
of expertise that you need to be able to address this,” he comments. By “this”, he is referring to sustainable development – and how science
and technology can be brought to bear on poverty, AIDs, tropical diseases,
climate change and other issues confronting the globe. Sachs is director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, a
collection of about 1,000 scholars across eight institutions. He is also a special adviser to
Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, eight key
development objectives endorsed by more than 160 world leaders in 2000, and was
recently chair of the World Health Organization Commission on Macroeconomics
and Health. His curriculum vitae
runs 26 pages. In a pressed white shirt, red tie and blue suit, with JFK-like hair,
the 48-year old Sachs is quick, complete and polished. In the two months after he left Harvard
University for Columbia in July, he has been to Columbia’s Biosphere 2 Center
in Arizona, the Barcelona AIDS conference, Cambodia, the Tibetan plateau, and
then to the Johannesburg Summit on sustainability before heading back to New
York for the beginning of the semester.
His extensive travels have led him to realize the importance of
geography, he informs me as we wait for his first appointment on a brilliant
September morning. “It isn’t possible to do good economic
development thinking without understanding the physical environment, deeply, in
which economic development is supposed to take place,” he says. He complains that this “physical framing” is hardly considered by the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund, nor is it taught to graduate students in economics. As a result, “the physical scientists inherently feel that public policy
somehow passes them by,” Sachs remarks. “They feel
politicians neglect a lot of the important messages or don’t understand the
risks, say, of anthropogenic climate change or of biodiversity depletion.” Yet he has often encountered a
resistance among social scientists, who believe everything is a root a
political problem. When the president of Bulgaria, Georgi Purvanov, arrives, the meeting
is a getting-to-know-you, with Purvanov asking through an interpreter for
Sach’s help. “[European Union]
membership and entry to NATO will be the framework to make Bulgaria advance the
fastest,” Sachs tells Purvanov. He
also recommends that Bulgaria invest in education, science, and technology and
points to Ireland’s growth in information technology and financial services as
a good model. He urges Purvanov to
flatter corporate CEOs for their business. One of Sach’s first international triumphs was as an economic adviser
to the government of Bolivia from 1986 to 1990, when he helped to bring down
that country’s inflation rate from 40,000 percent a year to 10. But his role as leading economic advisor
to Russia in 1992 and 1993 has drawn criticism; advice such as the elimination
of price controls and of subsidies to unprofitable state enterprises had proved
successful in eastern European governments but was fruitless in Russia’s
tumultuous transition to capitalism. The meeting with Purvanov ends with thanks all around, and immediately
Sachs is before the bright light of a Bulgarian television crew. His assistant, Gordon McCord, worries
that we have 30 minutes to get to someplace that is 45 minutes away. Sachs ends his television interview,
and we race six blocks through the UN security zone to a waiting town car. Once inside, Sachs jumps on his cell phone, talking to a reporter from
the Nation about cross-border
commercial bank lending. Traffic
is a mess and has our driver swearing.
We pull up to the Crowne Plaza hotel near LaGuardia Airport 45 minutes
late; hanging up, he comments that his life is “pretty much to the wall every
day”. Prominent in Sach’s frequent op-ed pieces is the inadequacy of foreign
aid in light of the tremendous problems affecting the developing world – the genesis of which, he says, was the American use of foreign aid as
a tactical tool during the Cold War.
The strategy, he
thinks, remains in play. “So far the United States remains committed to gimmickry rather than real solutions.
In the short term the US is courting a worldwide backlash of
anti-Americanism” that nontravelers don’t recognize. And he
sees the US eventually suffering from its failure to address the collapses of
governments, failed economies, mass refugee movements, the spread of disease
and terrorist activities arising from such conditions – not to mention the
longer-term risks of climate change, biodiversity loss and the depletion of
vital biological resources. Over the next 45 minutes Sachs presents his views of the Indian
economy, off the cuff, to about 75 participants at the Global Organization of
People of Indian Origin conference.
Again he demonstrates his mastery of economic details, holding forth on
India’s business environment, its recent rain-deficient monsoon season and
especially it’s “profound underinvestment” in health care: only $2 per person per year. Sachs is not a fan of unfettered capitalism. “I don’t believe in free markets for health care and science
policy”, he
says. Long fascinated by the
debate between capitalism and socialism, the Detroit native studied economics
at Harvard all the way to his Ph.D in the field; he received tenure at the age
of 28. Back in the car, Sachs calls Bono, lead singer of the band U2, who has
been active in addressing the problems of developing countries. They traveled together last January,
when a visit to an AIDS hospital in Malawi left a deep impression on
Sachs. The ward was filled with
patients, in some cases three to a bed – or huddling under them, out of the
way. Sachs has written of “a
constant low-level moan and fixed gazes of the emaciated faces,” all for the
lack of a dollar-a-day’s
worth of antiretroviral drugs sold elsewhere in the building.
The trip, he explains, demonstrated to him “why you have to be there to
get it.” Bono is “very impressive and committed”, Sachs says. He leaves him a message about an
upcoming meeting of philanthropic foundations at investor George Soros’s house. At the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, NY, Sachs gives a
lecture to his troops, the first time many of them have seen him in
person. His talk includes a long
and impressively detailed aside on the biology and epidemiology of malaria.
“Malaria has been the single greatest shaper of wealth and poverty in
the world,” he informs the group. “He is the best ally we could have for raising money for malaria
research,” says Harold Varmus, who is president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center in New York and who served on the WHO commission with Sachs. Varmus relates how Sachs, while writing
the WHO report, took a train with his wife on the Silk Road across Asia,
e-mailing sections of the report from Mongolian villages. “He is a phenomenon,” Varmus adds. There’s no time for a beer afterward – Sachs is catching a plane back
to Boston for the weekend, where his wife and son still live until his son
graduates from high school this year.
“Like every good day,” he says, “it ends with a mad dash to some
airport.” When we’re in a cellular dead zone, I ask Sachs for his broader
views. He sees many underlying
trends that are very positive, especially the mobilization of science and technology around the
world. “The rich are already rich enough to be
able to end poverty.
But we have the capacity to wreck things,” too, he states. “So many of our problems revolve around our capacity to
cooperate on a global scale, which we’ve never done before in the history of the world. We have to do the things we’ve never done before.”
At the airport Sachs tips the drive, bids his goodbye, and goes off to
do them. David Appell, a frequent contributor, is
based in Ogunquit, Me. Outgoing mail scanned by NAV 2002 |
