The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [102]
America should define its long-term economic goals similarly. There is, of course, no single moon shot, no variable such as gross domestic product or the unemployment rate, that can encapsulate all of our economic aspirations, but we can effectively define the major goals of a mindful economy as I did in chapter 10, with specific targets for the year 2020. In a mindful society, such goals will be widely known, and progress toward the goals will be systematically reviewed each year in the State of the Union address and the annual budget proposal. Specific objectives are frightening to make and even harder to achieve. Yet, as Kennedy said, the aspiration to accomplish great goals helps us organize the best of our energies and skills.
One part of setting bold but achievable goals is to benchmark America’s performance with other countries. There are many such benchmarking exercises, but they are paid little attention by Washington and the public. If the political leadership and the American public begin to pay more attention to these benchmarks, they will better understand the case for reform.
Mobilize Expertise
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 government’s departments are organized along the traditional lines that reflect the era when issues hit the American political radar screen, not the crosscutting challenges that we face today. The departments of Labor and Commerce date from 1913, during the Progressive Era. The Department of Energy dates from 1977, following the first oil crisis. It was almost dismantled by the Reagan administration on free-market principles. We have no departments for sustainable development, climate change, international economic development, or national infrastructure. The White House offices in these areas provide no substitutes for a department. Obama’s former “climate change czar” Carol Browner had a staff of fewer than a dozen professionals, almost all of whom were focused on congressional liaison rather than the technical substance of the climate change and energy agenda.
Congress is notoriously ill equipped to deal with these technical issues. Among the 535 members of Congress, those with advanced scientific and engineering training include three physicists, one chemist, six engineers, one microbiologist, and sixteen medical doctors, accounting for just 5 percent of the members.4 Several decades back the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) helped Congress navigate through the technology thicket. The OTA lasted from 1972 to 1995 and was then closed by a Republican-dominated Congress imbued with free-market fervor and the belief that science doesn’t matter (or, perhaps more accurately, that it is threatening to powerful interests).
America’s scientific and technological experts in academia and industry would be honored to contribute their knowledge toward national problem solving, but they are too rarely asked. Expertise can be harnessed through special commissions and research programs led by leading scientific bodies (such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the national laboratories). Both Congress and the administration need stronger and more systematic scientific advice. Congress should