‘I thought never again meant never again’
Matthew d’Ancona talks to this year’s Reith Lecturer, Jeffrey Sachs, about a world ‘bursting at the seams’, the practicalities of ending poverty — and his friendship with George Osborne
New York
As I ascend the solemn steps of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, a Parthenon transplanted to Broadway, the early spring snow crunches underfoot and the woes of Africa and the developing world seem very distant. Yet that is what I am here to discuss with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the university’s Earth Institute and this year’s Reith Lecturer.
For his five Radio 4 programmes, the first of which was broadcast this week, Sachs has chosen the title ‘Bursting at the Seams’, which is how he sees the 21st-century world and its afflictions: extreme poverty, environmental crisis, terrorism, disease, bad governance.
A youthful 52, with a distinctive thatch of dark hair, Sachs is an energetic and affable conversationalist, infectiously urgent in manner rather than preachy. ‘In a world of 6.6 billion people rising to perhaps nine billion or more by mid-century,’ he tells me, ‘with the profound environmental stresses that we have, with the massive shifts of geopolitics, the rise of Asia, the relative decline of Europe and the North Atlantic, the big relative changes of demographic patterns both within our countries and across countries, we are facing a set of very deep challenges that could really send the world right off the rails — or that could, if handled properly, actually leverage into a world of true sustainable development. So the theme is a crowded planet that presents some unprecedented choices.’ So far, so familiar. But what makes Sachs so interesting is his love of the practical, the small-scale and the immediately feasible rather than the grand utopian project. Twenty years ago, the development lobby tended towards irredeemable pessimism, persuaded that the problems of subSaharan Africa were, if not actually intractable, then of insufficient interest to the developed world to be soluble.
In his bestseller The End of Poverty, Sachs takes an entirely different approach, identifying three basic strategies. First, Africa needs an agricultural revolution of the sort that transformed India and China in the 1960s and 1970s: basics such as irrigation, improved seeds, and fertilisers that would bring food security, self-sufficiency and the foundations of subsequent industrialisation. Second, there must be a targeted campaign against malaria and other tropical diseases, with a particular emphasis on the distribution of insecticide-treated malaria nets (‘Bed nets don’t end up in Swiss bank accounts’).
Third, aid and technical assistance have to be rigorously focused on the basic infrastructure that would bring the remote African highlands into contact with trade routes. The world is becoming richer, he happily acknowledges, but a rising tide will not lift all boats. ‘If you start so poor that you don’t have [roads and other basic infrastructure], the market is not going to rescue you,’ he says. ‘The market is trained to ignore you.’ The trick, he continues, is for the developed countries to take the small steps necessary to bring the bottom sixth of the world into the market, to everyone’s long-term mutual benefit. Why have poverty, instability, and ecological conflicts such as the horrors of Darfur when you could have a whole new marketplace for Western products and services in less than 20 years?
Although Sachs has often been claimed by New Labour (and especially Gordon Brown) as one of its own, the reviving Conservative party has also taken a deep interest in his ideas. On a trip to Uganda with the economist in January, George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, pledged that a future Conservative government would spend at least £500 million a year on fighting malaria. At the dinner after the recording of his first Reith Lecture at the Royal Society, Sachs astonished the assembled liberal luminaries, including Neil Kinnock, by saying that he was ‘so honoured that George and Frances Osborne are here’.
In his Columbia office, he repeats the sentiments, referring to the shadow Chancellor’s promise. ‘It is a wonderful kind of commitment, it is the kind of leadership that, if generalised and if it leads across the Atlantic, could actually bring this disease, which was just left to kill by the millions in recent decades, decisively under control.’ If Blair and Brown are the Lennon and McCartney of international development, does that make Mr Osborne Mick Jagger? Sachs, of course, knows all about the modern intertwining of celebrity and geopolitics, and has worked closely with Bono, who ‘has just about the most amazing Rolodex in the world’. He recalls one occasion when the U2 singer was inside the White House negotiating with the Bush administration, occasionally making calls to his economist friend. Thus had the roles been reversed. The Ivy League academic was on the outside, the pop-star activist on the inside: indeed, in this particular case, it was Bono, not Sachs, who telephoned Jesse Helms, one of the leaders of the religious Right, and convinced him to put pressure on the President.
Sachs himself is no friend to the current administration. He was dismayed by the Iraq war (and by Tony Blair’s support for it), and has no time for the neoconservative response to 9/11. ‘As horrific as these events were, this was not World War Three, as it was declared to be by many people. This readiness to call it “a war on terror”, or “a new world war”, or “a great twilight struggle”, or “the greatest struggle of our time” — from that first moment, I felt this was actually the most dangerous part of all of it. I still do.’ While many will agree with him that ‘everybody is fighting us [in Iraq] because we don’t belong on the ground there’ and that the war was ‘the greatest blunder of current times’, he will find fewer takers for his claim that September 11 ‘was not a world-changing event’ and that July 7 was not ‘fundamental for the UK future’. The chink in his intellectual armour is a failure to take ideology — in this case Islamism as seriously as he might: a disinclination to see that values are as important as economics in explaining conflict. I suspect this will be one of many fiercely argued points to emerge from his lectures.
That said, those who caricature Sachs as a woolly liberal miss the point of him entirely. His greatest scholarly antagonist, Professor William Easterly of New York University, and author of The White Man’s Burden, accuses Sachs of drawing up a utopian ‘Big Plan’. But this is simply incorrect: the whole point of the Reith Lecturer’s approach to development, and what makes it compelling, is that it is based not on the unattainable grand projet, but on thousands of small measures, all easily affordable under existing spending pledges made by the developed world (and equivalent to 20 hours of global economic activity per annum).
‘My approach is practical, it is grounded, it is based on proven interventions, it is ecologically specific and it is above all looking for direct scaleable methods to address specific ills that in my view are what’s trapping people in the most desperate kind of poverty in a world of technological capacity.’ (To take an example: it would cost only $1.5 billion to protect every sleeping site in Africa from malaria for five years.) Equally, Sachs is robust on the need to manage immigration in an era of unprecedented population mobility. He is a classical pro-market economist who was closely engaged in the shock therapy administered to post-communist countries such as Poland, Slovenia and Estonia and was an adviser to Boris Yeltsin from 1991 to 1994. In the mid-Eighties he designed a policy package for Bolivia that brought its rate of inflation down from 40,000 per cent to almost zero.
More to the point, he does not share the contempt for corporations of the majority in the global justice movement. On the contrary, he regards foreign investment by big companies as essential for the developing world, a means of drawing workers, and especially women, out of the villages and into the towns and expanding their horizons. ‘The idea that somehow multinational companies per se are against human wellbeing or against development is a nonsense,’ he says, ‘that somehow the thing that is wrong with the world is that we are in a world of corporations and that this is the root of the evil, this is just a huge misunderstanding.’ Big business, he says, is way ahead of governments on global development.
And while he believes strongly in the United Nations, and was special adviser to Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, he is clear-sighted about the need for radical reform of the UN. ‘As a bureaucracy, it could and should be far more operational. It should be given that operational authority, it needs reform, it needs a more stable budget, it needs less threats from the powerful countries.’ Nor is he starry-eyed about the blossoming of a global demos. ‘In terms of a public ethos and global spirit and global awareness, I do think that’s coming but it is not automatic, because the forces of entropy and division are very powerful and we could get that dis astrously wrong. We are really at serious risk of not only not having a global ethic and a shared global democratic spirit, we are really at risk of serious conflict, much greater than we think we are, because social dynamics have a way of letting things get out of control.’ In the last of his lectures, to be broadcast on 9 May, he will try to resolve the fundamental intellectual conundrum: ‘How you can square the lack of strong central executive authority with achieving global goals.’ As listeners will discover, this Reith series takes the lecturer on tour from London to Beijing, back home to New York, then to London again and, finally, Edinburgh, home of the Scottish Enlightenment that Sachs so admires. In China, Sue Lawley, who is chairing the lectures, caught a cold while out jogging, and at the event at Columbia that I attended (to be broadcast on 25 April), she is doing her noble best to save her voice for the presentation.
In this lecture, Sachs draws heavily on John F. Kennedy’s speech in June 1963 on peace with the Soviet Union — a masterpiece of rhetoric most famous for this line, which the economist quotes: ‘In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.’ In the front row sits the 79-year-old who wrote those lapidary words more than four decades ago: Ted Sorensen, whom JFK described as his ‘intellectual bloodbank’. Sorensen nods approvingly. For Sachs, there is a moving symmetry to this moment, and it is not lost on his audience of New York worthies and students. (On campus, the Columbia undergraduates have even started an online campaign to persuade Sachs to run for President — www.sachsforpresident.org, if you’re interested.) These will be Reith Lectures worth listening to, by friend and foe alike. One wants to know what lies at the heart of Sachs’s passion, his sleepless commitment to the task. The answer, or part of the answer, comes back in his office. ‘I grew up in a Jewish family, in a largely Jewish community, in the Midwest of the United States, born nine years after the end of World War Two, and very much in the shadow of the Holocaust, with a family that had lost many, many people in Europe,’ he says. ‘The notion that the world could ever knowingly leave millions to die after what we learnt was beyond anything I could ever have guessed or dreamt. However naive or not, I took it as a core belief, growing up, that never again meant never again.’ He pauses. ‘It doesn’t take heroism to save millions of people. It takes simple measures.’
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