Review: Jeffrey Sachs’s call to arms to avert global disaster

Economics for a Crowded Planet By Jeffrey D. Sachs 386 pages. $27.95. The Penguin Press.

Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of seemingly unstoppable developments like climate change and the explosive growth of China and India. Which is why Sachs’s book – lucid, quietly urgent and relentlessly logical – resonates. Things are different today, he writes, because of four trends: human pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world. By 2050, he writes, the world’s population may rise to 9.2 billion from 6.6 billion today, an increase of 2.6 billion people, which is “too many people to absorb safely.” The combination of climate change and a rapidly growing population clustering in coastal urban zones will set the stage for many Katrinas, not to mention “a global epidemic of obesity, cardiovascular disease and adult-onset diabetes.”
Sachs smartly describes how we got here, and the path we must take to avert disaster. The director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author of “The End of Poverty,” Sachs is perhaps the best-known economist writing on developmental issues (or any other kind of issues) today. And this is Bigthink with a capital B. “The very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources will become passe,” he writes, introducing a reasoned plea for one-worldism. “In the 21st century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them.” By working together and harnessing the productive genius of the public and private sectors, Sachs argues, we can build sustainable systems, stabilize world population at about eight billion and end extreme poverty by 2025.

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As for psychology, the cool, persistent logic that powers Sachs’s prose doesn’t account for the many irrationalities embedded in personal economic choices, and hence in the global system at large. The subtext of Sachs’s argument is that we could solve all the problems we face – from global warming to persistent poverty – if only we acted in a rational, commonsensical manner. But the growing cadre of behavioral economists has highlighted the myriad ways in which fear, neurosis and desire influence economic decisions large and small. I would have enjoyed seeing Sachs take a detour into the behaviorists’ lounge to see how we could create structures and incentives that would encourage irrational people to engage in the sort of rational collective and individual action he urges.

International Herald Tribune