Jeffrey Sachs Quotes

History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.

We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.

The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.

The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.

Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.

The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.

world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss.

Similarly, though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.

La mala salud causa pobreza y la pobreza contribuye a empeorar la salud

Si continuamos haciendo las cosas como de costumbre, acabaremos padeciendo una crisis social y ecológica de consecuencias catastróficas

Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.

Demasiados de nosotros pensamos "Que La Paz" es imposible. Demasiados pensamos que es irreal. Pero esta es una opinión peligrosa y derrotista. Nos lleva a pensar que la guerra es inevitable...

Jamás alcanzaremos el objetivo de convergencia económica porque esta labor se vería frustrada por una catástrofe medioambiental. Muchos ecologistas afirman que, estamos condenados a reducir consecuentemente el crecimiento económico..

The current situation reminds me too much of the fable of the farmer whose chickens are dying. The local priest gives one remedy af- ter another—prayers, potions, oaths—until all of the chickens are dead. "Too bad," says the priest, "I had so many other good ideas.

I know that if you spend enough on each person person in a village, you will change their lives. If you put in enough resources-enough mzungu,foreigners, technical assistance, and money-lives change. I know that....The problem is, when you walk, what happens? -Simon Bland

The rich world dominates the training of Ph.D. economists, and the students of rich-world Ph.D. programs dominate the international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have the lead in advising poor countries on how to break out of poverty.

Sustainability, or fairness to the future, therefore involves the concept of stewardship, the idea that the living generation must be stewards of the earth’s resources for the generations that will come later. That’s a tough role to play. There is nothing natural or innate about it. We need to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met and never will. Yet those are our descendants and our fellow humanity. Alas, it’s a role that we’ve mostly ignored till now, to the increasing peril of all who will follow. The

Una combinación de inversiones en sintonía con las necesidades y condiciones locales pueden permitir que las economías africanas escapen de la trampa de la pobreza

La situación actual se parece un poco al chiste que hacían los trabajadores de la antigua Unión Soviética: «¡Nosotros hacemos como que trabajamos y usted hace como que nos paga!»

Adam Smith

What can we do? We cannot enforce. We try to explain. We want to empower. But no one can come and change them if they do not want themselves -Ahmed Maalim Mohamed

reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them.

sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty

We have entered a new era. Global society is interconnected as never before. [...] I suggest that we have arrived in the Age of Sustainable Development.

Debemos concentrarnos en el punto de partida: ofrecer a los más pobres del mundo bienes tan evidentes como las vacunas, antibióticos, los suplementos alimentarios, las variedades de semillas mejoradas, los fertilizantes, las carreteras, las perforaciones, las cañerías, los libros de textos y las enfermeras. esto no significa convertir a los pobres en seres dependientes de los regalos; es darle los insumos que compenses sus esfuerzos por mejorara su nivel de vida".

In rural societies, large families are almost always the norm. In urban societies, families choose to have fewer children. This is the crux of the demographic transition, one of the most fundamental of all social changes during the era of modern economic growth.

Some estimate that the challenge, while immense, does not impose burdens comparable to those of 1941. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a careful study, concludes that 'contrary to some commentaries, decarbonization will not require grand mobilization of the U.S. economy on par with World War II. The incremental costs of decarbonization above our normal energy costs will amount to 1 to 2 percent of U.S. GDP per year during the period to 2050. By contrast, during World War II, federal outlays soared to 43 percent of GDP from the prewar level of 10 percent of GDP in 1940.

Over the course of nearly a half-century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by U.S. strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire.

The Millennials, as a result, are less likely to be divided or even torn asunder by the culture wars of the boomer generation. They will live naturally with diversity. They will accept a more activist government. They will be more attuned to environmental needs. All this points in the direction of the mindful economy, if the healing strengths of the Millennial generation’s tolerance and optimism are mobilized for collective political action. What,

It’s never enough,” he repeated, “but it is so much more than we had before. Without the Millennium project there would be no drugs, there would be no surgical equipment, there would be no way to operate the generator—I would be redundant most of the time. They say funding will continue, but someday it will stop, and when the funding stops, most likely everything we have done will be put to waste. I do not see how we are going to continue after they have left.

The Great Rupture At the beginning of the twentieth century, globalization was viewed as so inevitable that some thought war itself was probably passé, and certainly so irrational that no right-thinking leader in Europe would ever take his country to war. In 1910, a leading British pundit, Norman Angell, wrote The Great Illusion, which rightly argued that national economies had become so interdependent, so much part of a global division of labor, that war among the economic leaders had become unimaginably destructive. War, Angell warned, would so undermine the network of international trade that no military venture by a European power against another could conceivably lead to economic benefits for the aggressor. He surmised that war itself would cease once the costs and benefits of war were more clearly understood. Angell tremendously underestimated the irrationalities and social processes that lead to devastating outcomes, even when they make no sense.

REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

If Bob envies Alice, he derives unhappiness from the difference between Alice’s well-being and his own; the greater the difference, the more unhappy he is. Conversely, if Alice is proud of her superiority over Bob, she derives happiness not just from her own intrinsic well-being but also from the fact that it is higher than Bob’s. It is easy to show that, in a mathematical sense, pride and envy work in roughly the same way as sadism; they lead Alice and Bob to derive happiness purely from reducing each other’s well-being, because a reduction in Bob’s well-being increases Alice’s pride, while a reduction in Alice’s well-being reduces Bob’s envy.31 Jeffrey Sachs, the renowned development economist, once told me a story that illustrated the power of these kinds of preferences in people’s thinking. He was in Bangladesh soon after a major flood had devastated one region of the country. He was speaking to a farmer who had lost his house, his fields, all his animals, and one of his children. “I’m so sorry—you must be terribly sad,” Sachs ventured. “Not at all,” replied the farmer. “I’m pretty happy because my damned neighbor has lost his wife and all his children too!

The first cut at the problem—the simplest but still eye-opening—is to ask how much income would have to be transferred from rich countries to poor countries to lift all of the world’s extreme poor to an income level sufficient to meet basic needs. Martin Ravallion and his colleagues on the World Bank’s poverty team have gathered data to address this question, at least approximately. The World Bank estimates that meeting basic needs requires $1.08 per day per person, measured in 1993 purchasing-power adjusted prices. Using household surveys, the Ravallion team has calculated the numbers of poor people around the world who live below that threshold, and the average incomes of those poor. According to the Bank’s estimates, 1.1 billion people lived below the $1.08 level as of 2001, with an average income of $0.77 per day, or $281 per year. More important, the poor had a shortfall relative to basic needs of $0.31 per day ($1.08 minus $0.77), or $113 per year. Worldwide, the total income shortfall of the poor in 2001 was therefore $113 per year per person multiplied by 1.1 billion people, or $124 billion. Using the same accounting units (1993 purchasing power adjusted U.S. dollars), the income of the twenty-two donor countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2001 was $20.2 trillion. Thus a transfer of 0.6 percent of donor income, amounting to $124 billion, would in theory raise all 1.1 billion of the world’s extreme poor to the basic-needs level. Notably, this transfer could be accomplished within the 0.7 percent of the GNP target of the donor countries. That transfer would not have been possible in 1980, when the numbers of the extreme poor were larger (1.5 billion) and the incomes of the rich countries considerably smaller. Back in 1981, the total income gap was around $208 billion (again, measured in 1993 purchasing power prices) and the combined donor country GNP was $13.2 trillion. Then it would have required 1.6 percent of donor income in transfers to raise the extreme poor to the basic-needs level.

The most important concept about our economic future is that it is our choice and in our hands, both individually and collectively as citizens.

The scale of U.S. military operations is remarkable. The U.S. Department of Defense has (as of a 2014 inventory) 4,855 military facilities, of which 4,154 are in the United States; 114 are in overseas U.S. territories; and 587 are in forty-two foreign countries and foreign territories in all regions of the world.2 Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the U.S. intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of U.S. national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans’ benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.

There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Cheney-Wolfowitz dreams of U.S. dominance were taking shape, that figure was around 22 percent. By now, according to IMF estimates, the U.S. share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States at 18 percent.6 By 2021, according to IMF projections, the United States will produce 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent.

we may well look back at the 2016 election as the moment when the corruption and sheer incompetence of Washington became so large and transparent that an era of reform finally got underway. Even if Washington goes badly in the wrong direction in 2017 and beyond, the American people may begin to mobilize for true and deep political reforms.

The political beauty of our online age is that it’s now actually feasible—and urgently necessary—to reengage the public in just this way. In Aristotle’s time, Athenian citizens assembled on the Pnyx hillside near the Acropolis to cast their ballots. For most of American history, elected representatives came together in the Congress to cast votes in the name of the people. Yet that kind of representation is now in name only, except if you happen to be a wealthy campaign contributor. In the coming age of e-governance, however, direct democracy will once again become feasible, and indeed inevitable.

four very powerful corporate lobbies have repeatedly come out on top and turned our democracy into what might more accurately be called a corporatocracy.

Is there a way forward, when campaign financing and mega-lobbying have displaced the common good and have led Americans to despair about the functioning of the political system? Since incumbent politicians won’t vote for campaign reform on their own, are we doomed to a vicious circle of big money, big corruption, failing public services, and a collapse of democratic rule?

Here is my recommendation for President Trump and the new Congress. Turn immediately to our glorious national institutions, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for a report to the nation on the key areas for science and technology investments in the coming generation. Ask them to recommend an organizational strategy for a science-based scaling up of national and global R&D efforts. Call on America’s research universities to add their own brainstorming to the work of the national academies. Later in 2017, the president and Congress should then meet in a joint session of Congress to set forth a new technology vision for the nation and an R&D strategy to achieve it.

«El crecimiento es una consecuencia, no una política.»   JEFFREY SACHS

We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology. That, in a nutshell, is how we have lurched into the early twenty-first century.”9

we need an honest approach to poverty, not one that blames the poor and leaves them to their fate. We know that the single most important key to ending the cycle of poverty is to enable today’s children growing up in poverty to reach their full human potential. That in turn requires that America as a society invest in the human capital—meaning the health, nutrition, cognitive skill, and education—of every child in the nation, whether born to wealth or poverty.

it is the provision of public services, notably the universal access to affordable day care, even more than income support to families, that is key to the elimination of poverty among families with children. Sweden’s public services, of uniformly high quality, ensure a decent start for all children. Sweden

It is easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of economic policy: the life satisfaction of the population. That ultimate goal should be unassailable for a country founded precisely to defend the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

When the political and economic situation is as dangerous as it is today, cynicism and loss of time are far more dangerous than they look. History plays cruel tricks on the unserious. American political leaders have been in an unserious mood for years, unwilling to level with the American people. The

humans have a profound ability both to cooperate and nurture and to shun others and fight.8 In our advanced technological age, with the capacity of our weapons to end human life, our ability to master our baser emotions and channel them toward constructive and cooperative outcomes will provide the basis for our survival.

They did not understand that by liberalizing imports, the government was also promoting exports.

Markets are reasonably efficient institutions for allocating society’s scarce economic resources and lead to high productivity and average living standards. Efficiency, however, does not guarantee fairness (or “justice”) in the allocation of incomes. Fairness requires the government to redistribute income among the citizenry, especially from the richest members of the society to the poorest and most vulnerable members. Markets systematically underprovide certain “public goods,” such as infrastructure, environmental regulation, education, and scientific research, whose adequate supply depends on the government. The market economy is prone to financial instability, which can be alleviated through active government policies, including financial regulation and well-directed monetary and fiscal policies. Samuelson

Libertarians aim to absolve the rich of any social responsibilities toward the rest of society. As a school of thought, libertarianism is based on three kinds of arguments. The first is a moral assertion: that every individual has the overriding right to liberty, that is, the right to be left alone, free from taxes, regulations, or other demands of the state. The second is political and pragmatic: that only free markets protect democracy from government despotism. The third is economic: that free markets alone are enough to ensure prosperity. Such

When libertarians deride the idea of social fairness as just one more nuisance, they unleash greed. The kind of unconstrained greed that is now loose in America is leading not to real liberty but to corporate criminality and deceit; not to democracy but to politics dominated by special interests; and not to prosperity but to income stagnation for much of the population and untold riches at the very top.

We need the rich today to do their modest part to enable all of society to share in prosperity. By passing that hurdle, we would reduce the need for long-term transfers from rich to poor in the future. The

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.”5

America cut back on “welfare” from the 1970s onward. Family income support fell from 0.4 percent of GDP in 1970 to under 0.2 percent in 2010.16 Welfare still looms large in the public’s imagination, but it plays little role in the budget and the deficit. It’s been a long time since America was generous to its poor families with children! The

expecting to find good twenty-first-century economic answers in a constitution that dates back to 1789 is unrealistic. The Founding Fathers were clever, to be sure, but the cleverest thing they realized is that Thomas Jefferson’s famous aphorism that “the earth belongs to the living” means laws from a premodern age should not blindly bind us today.

The compromises made with the rich are consistently out of line with public opinion. The public desires to tax the rich more heavily, cut military spending, and develop renewable energy alternatives to oil. The outcome instead is tax cuts for the rich, unchecked military spending, and a continued stagnation in alternatives to oil, gas, and coal. Both

A new governing majority will depend on two breakthroughs. The first is that voters, not big money, once again determine election outcomes. We need to break out of the money-politics-media trap. The second is that government be able to translate increased revenues into effective public services and infrastructure. We need, in short, a return to civic virtue, in which Americans recommit to contributing to the common benefit and to cooperating for mutual gain.

The problems facing America have become much more complex over time, and the political class lacks the capacity to deal with them. The problems are global, interconnected across many areas of politics and policy, and often highly technical. The climate change challenge, for example, involves agriculture (both as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and as a highly vulnerable sector), electricity generation and distribution, federal and private land use, transportation, urban design, nuclear power, disaster risk management, climate modeling, international financing, public health, and global negotiations. Could one imagine a problem less easily handled by a layman Congress operating on a two-year election cycle? The

The Tea Party is a concoction of the anger of middle-aged, middle-class white Americans who sense that their cohort is slipping from economic security and social dominance. They are furious, of course, and are easily manipulated by the status quo interests. That’s an old story. Time is against them. The

is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?10 Kennedy

our common humanity made it possible to find common cause in the midst of competition and that peace depended on our own virtue and ethical behavior.

Our greatest national illusion is that a healthy society can be organized around the single-minded pursuit of wealth.

Whatever the cause, the United States is privately rich but socially poor. It caters to the pursuit of wealth but pays scant attention to those left behind. And though American culture emphasizes individualism and the pursuit of individual wealth perhaps more than any other society, that focus does not lead to greater happiness. Of

According to the latest wealth data of the Federal Reserve Board in the Flow of Funds, the total net worth of households is around $56.8 trillion.27 The wealth of the top 1 percent is therefore around $20.6 trillion. With roughly 113 million households, the average wealth of the richest 1 percent is roughly $18.2 million per household.

We need not presume to shape the distant future; we need only respect the prospects of those newly born today. End

DISPARITIES AND HIGH COSTS FUEL THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one. The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling. The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large. The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals put good health for all in a central place in sustainable development, notably in SDG 3. This goal calls for massive reductions of the burdens of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. SDG 3 (Target 3.8) also emphasizes the need for universal and equitable access to quality health care, in order to “achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines

DISPARITIES AND HIGH COSTS FUEL THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one. The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling. The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large. The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals put good health for all in a central place in sustainable development, notably in SDG 3. This goal calls for massive reductions of the burdens of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. SDG 3 (Target 3.8) also emphasizes the need for universal and equitable access to quality health care, in order to “achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.

In many cases, help for the poor is not simply an income transfer used for short-run consumption but is a government benefit that enables poor households to raise their long-term productivity. Some of the key government programs for poor households include help for nutrition of mothers and young children; preschool; college tuition; and job training. Each of these is a government-supported investment in “human capital” and specifically a way for a poor household to raise its long-term productivity. Taxing the rich to help the poor can then mean cutting lavish consumption spending by the rich to support high-return human investments by the poor. The outcome is not only fairer but also more efficient. The

Here, then, are some things on which Americans broadly agree. They agree that there should be equality of opportunity for American citizens. They agree that individuals should make the maximum effort to help themselves. They agree that government should help those in real need, as long as they are also trying to help themselves. And they broadly agree that the rich should pay more in taxes. These core values can form the basis of a broad and effective consensus on the basic direction of economic policy. In

The most powerful tool for breaking extreme poverty is a holistic community-based development strategy that combines vocational training and job placement, early childhood development, educational upgrading, and local infrastructure. Each part of the antipoverty effort supports all of the others. This kind of ground-up development effort must in practice be led by the communities themselves but backed with financing from the federal and state governments. Options

We need more government, but also a much more competent and honest government. Economic reform and political reform must go hand in hand. Without the one there cannot be the other. The

The supposition that there is massive waste to be cut in the civilian budget is simply a myth. To recapitulate: ending all earmarks and foreign aid and achieving all of the specific cuts on civilian programs proposed by the deficit commission, even if such choices were meritorious, would amount to less than 1 percent of GDP. True

the United States will need substantially more revenues to close the budget deficit, especially recognizing the need to increase federal spending in certain critical areas. I

The end result of all this consumption is a society running furiously to stay in place. The overwork by each member of society puts a burden (a negative externality) on others, who must also run hard to keep up. Consumers also run because others are running, with everybody finding themselves in a race they’d rather do without. The

We need to reconceive the idea of a good society in the early twenty-first century and to find a creative path toward it. Most important, we need to be ready to pay the price of civilization through multiple acts of good citizenship: bearing our fair share of taxes, educating ourselves deeply about society’s needs, acting as vigilant stewards for future generations, and remembering that compassion is the glue that holds society together.

The combination of higher income taxation and wealth taxation would thereby raise at least 2 percentage points of GDP from the very top earners. But even if they had to pay another 2 percent of GDP, there would certainly be no need to shed tears for the rich. Their net-of-tax income would remain around 10 percent of GDP, a share of national income two-thirds higher than the 6 percent of GDP in 1980. There

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other

The upshot is the following: Perhaps 4 percent of extra GDP could be collected as of 2015 mainly by taxing the rich (2 percent), tightening corporate taxation (1 percent), strengthening tax enforcement (0.5 to 1 percent), taxing financial transactions, and taxing carbon emissions (0.5 percent). Introducing a VAT would raise even more revenues and could be phased in over several years. The point is that there are lots of options, and most of them could be concentrated near the top of the income distribution, where they belong. How

My point here is to insist that the rich should pay their way, and that they can easily afford to do so. All of the angst of canceling vital government programs to close the deficit is a charade put on by the rich for the rich. With a fair tax structure and a just contribution of the rich to the rest of society, we can afford a truly civilized America. Let

Basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.3 For

measures like GDP per person give only a rough reflection of the overall level of wellbeing of an individual or a nation. But for sustainable development we are interested in raising human wellbeing, not just in raising income, still less in a mad race for more riches for people who are already rich. Therefore, it is important to ask how we can best measure wellbeing (or life satisfaction) beyond GDP per capita.

Between state building and economic growth Having a state is a basic precondition for intensive economic growth. The economist Paul Collier has demonstrated the converse of this proposition, namely, that state breakdown, civil war, and interstate conflict have very negative consequences for growth.20 A great deal of Africa’s poverty in the late twentieth century was related to the fact that states there were very weak and subject to constant breakdown and instability. Beyond the establishment of a state that can provide for basic order, greater administrative capacity is also strongly correlated with economic growth. This is particularly true at low absolute levels of per capita GDP (less than $1,000); while it remains important at higher levels of income, the impact may not be proportionate. There is also a large literature linking good governance to economic growth, though the definition of “good governance” is not well established and, depending on the author, sometimes includes all three components of political development.21 While the correlation between a strong, coherent state and economic growth is well established, the direction of causality is not always clear. The economist Jeffrey Sachs has maintained that good governance is endogenous: it is the product of economic growth rather than a cause of it.22 There is a good logic to this: government costs money. One of the reasons why there is so much corruption in poor countries is that they cannot afford to pay their civil servants adequate salaries to feed their families, so they are inclined to take bribes. Per capita spending on all government services, from armies and roads to schools and police on the street, was about $17,000 in the United States in 2008 but only $19 in Afghanistan.23 It is therefore not a surprise that the Afghan state is much weaker than the American one, or that large flows of aid money generate corruption.

autarky,

Come Senators, Congressmen, Please heed the call, Don’t stand in the doorways, Don’t block up the halls…For the times they are a changin’.

This is an age of impunity, a time when the rich and powerful get away with their misdeeds, and are even lauded for them in some quarters.

A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure. In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is “conspicuous consumption,” that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.2

E. O. Wilson has summarized it in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, we exist with a bizarre combination of “Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

Do we know of effective ways to help the poor?” Implicit in Singer’s argument for helping others is the idea that you know how to do it: The moral imperative to ruin your suit is much less compelling if you do not know how to swim. This is why, in The Life You Can Save, Singer takes the trouble to offer his readers a list of concrete examples of things that they should support, regularly updated on his Web site.12 Kristof and WuDunn do the same. The point is simple: Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress. This is why it is really helpful to think in terms of concrete problems which can have specific answers, rather than foreign assistance in general: “aid” rather than “Aid.” To take an example, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), malaria caused almost 1 million deaths in 2008, mostly among African children.13 One thing we know is that sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets can help save many of these lives. Studies have shown that in areas where malaria infection is common, sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net reduces the incidence of malaria by half.14 What, then, is the best way to make sure that children sleep under bed nets? For approximately $10, you can deliver an insecticide-treated net to a family and teach the household how to use it. Should the government or an NGO give parents free bed nets, or ask them to buy their own, perhaps at a subsidized price? Or should we let them buy it in the market at full price? These questions can be answered, but the answers are by no means obvious. Yet many “experts” take strong positions on them that have little to do with evidence. Because malaria is contagious, if Mary sleeps under a bed net, John is less likely to get malaria—if at least half the population sleeps under a net, then even those who do not have much less risk of getting infected.15 The problem is that fewer than one-fourth of kids at risk sleep under a net:16 It looks like the $10 cost is too much for many families in Mali or Kenya. Given the benefits both to the user and others in the neighborhood, selling the nets at a discount or even giving them away would seem to be a good idea. Indeed, free bed-net distribution is one thing that Jeffrey Sachs advocates.

I'm 67 years old. it took me a long time to grow up to know that almost everything we hear is not true.

President Barack Obama, who unjustly received the Nobel Peace Prize, was directly involved in the illegal attack on Syria. Once again, the “divide and conquer” strategy was employed. The CIA trained and armed President Assad’s opponents, even though the UN ban on the use of force strictly prohibits arming militant groups in foreign countries. “We know they sent in the CIA to overthrow Assad,” revealed US economist Jeffrey Sachs, who teaches at Columbia University.

Globalist Klaus Schwab is the CEO of the World Economic Forum, He said. "You'll own nothing. You'll be happy" and he is not joking! I have lived in few countries, and few economic systems, from Socialism, Communism, and so called "Democratic" system who are fighting to turned America into a socialist country! Soliaist lead italy to Fascism Socialist lead Germany to Nasim Socialist lead Albania & many countries to communism! Communist killed more people than Fascist, and Nazist combine. Should we trust Socialist to lead America, and the world to Globalism? Globalist Jeffrey Sach said "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few.

where Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist most famous for having designed the “shock therapy” reforms applied to the former Soviet Union, had a live-on-video-link session in which he startled everyone by presenting what careful journalists might describe as an “unusually candid” assessment of those in charge of America’s financial institutions. Sachs’s testimony is especially valuable because, as he kept emphasizing, many of these people were quite up front with him because they assumed (not entirely without reason) that he was on their side: Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now . . . I know them. These are the people I have lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [These people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in a quite literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise. If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core . . . both parties are up to their necks in this. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it’s very, very unhealthy, I have waited for four years . . . five years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language. And I’ve have not seen it once.20 So there you have it. If Sachs was right—and honestly, who is in a better position to know?—then at the commanding heights of the financial system, we’re not actually talking about bullshit jobs. We’re not even talking about people who have come to believe their own propagandists. Really we’re just talking about a bunch of crooks.

the highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world.

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.

With higher saving and investment rates, both public and private, directed towards productive capital, the United States could overcome secular stagnation.