The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [2]
I didn’t train to be a clinical economist, though fortunately my theoretical training, combined with my wife’s inspiration and some very good professional luck, enabled me to forge an unusual personal path to clinical economics. I was blessed with a first-rate education as an undergraduate and graduate student at Harvard, where I later joined the faculty in 1980. With life-changing good fortune, I became involved in practical economic problem solving in Bolivia in 1985, and from then on I have built a career at the intersection of theory and practice. I spent much of the 1980s working in debt-ridden Latin America to help support that region’s return to democracy and macroeconomic stability after two decades of incompetent and violent military rule. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was invited to help Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in their transitions from communism and dictatorship to democracy and market economy. That work, in turn, brought me invitations to the world’s two great behemoths, China and India, where I could watch, debate, and share ideas about the world-changing market reforms of those two great societies. Since the mid-1990s, I have turned much of my attention to the poorest regions of the world, and especially to sub-Saharan Africa, to try to assist them in their ongoing fight against poverty, hunger, disease, and climate change.
Having worked in and diagnosed dozens of economies over my career, I’ve come to have a good feel for the interplay of politics, economics, and a society’s values. Lasting economic solutions are found when all of these components of social life are brought into a proper balance.
In this book I will bring clinical economics to bear on America’s economic crisis. By taking a holistic view of America’s economic problems, I hope to diagnose some of the deeper maladies afflicting our society today and to correct the basic misdiagnosis that was made thirty years ago and that still sticks today. When the U.S. economy hit the skids in the 1970s, the political Right, represented by Ronald Reagan, claimed that government was to blame for its growing ills. This diagnosis, although incorrect, had a plausible ring to it to enough Americans to enable the Reagan coalition to begin a process of dismantling effective government programs and undermining the government’s capacity to help steer the economy. We are still living with the disastrous consequences of that failed diagnosis, and we continue to ignore the real challenges, involving globalization, technological change, and environmental threats.
America Is Ready for Reform
After a thorough diagnosis in the first half of the book, I’ll get specific on what I think we should do. Those specific recommendations will raise several big issues. First, can we really afford more government activism in an era of huge budget deficits? I’ll show that we both can and must. Second, can a program of thoroughgoing reform really be manageable? Here, too, the answer is yes, even by a government that currently exhibits chronic incompetence. Third, is a reform program politically achievable in an era when politics is as divisive as it is today? Successful reforms are almost always initially greeted with a broad chorus of skepticism. “That is politically impossible.” “The public will never agree.” “Consensus is beyond reach.” These are the jeremiads we hear today whenever deep and real reforms are proposed. During my quarter century of work around the world, I’ve heard them time and again, only to find that deep reforms were not only possible but eventually came to be viewed as inevitable.