Lecture 1: Bursting at the Seams
The 21st century will be marked by severe natural resource limits, the rise of new economic powers and the threats of failed states. These are tectonic changes with the potential to unleash global-scale upheavals. Global cooperation of an unprecedented depth and scale will be needed but we are not yet prepared for such cooperation.
Lecture 2: Survival in the Anthropocene
The biggest challenges that we face - climate change, alleviation of hunger, water stress, energy - are translated in the shadow of ignorance into "us versus them" problems, with only the weakest links to underlying scientific principles and technological options.
Lecture 3: The Great Convergence
Power and America have seemed synonymous for the last fifty years. No longer. Power in the 21st Century is shifting to the East: to India and above all to China. Facing up to the end of centuries of North Atlantic dominance - first Europe then the U.S. -will pose huge challenges.
Lecture 4: Poverty in the Midst of Plenty
This lecture considers the challenges of extreme poverty and the extreme worry of the rest of the world which fears for its own prosperity. It spells out the limits of the free market to solve these problems and proposes a plan of action which presents choices to those listening.
Lecture 5: A New Politics for a New Age
The key political novelty of our age is mass political awareness and mobilization. Mass mobilization has brought the Age of Empire to an end, and accounts for the failures in Iraq. No society any longer tolerates being ruled by another. Social mobilization can be a dramatic force for positive change.
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Lunch with the FT: Jeffrey Sachs
The theme continues as we move on to talking about poverty in Africa. This has been the focus of his more recent work. Immediately, he shows his anger at those who claim aid fails because Africa remains desperately poor, even after some $2,300bn of aid - the figure comes from Professor William Easterly of New York University. Sachs manages a masterly dismissal; he calculates the amount as only $16 per poor person per year over the past 60 years. ”I see the number and say, well, that’s a pretty modest sum. The rest of the world sees the same number and says that’s a horrendous failure that’s nearly bankrupted us.”
Worse, Sachs thinks that Easterly’s criticisms of aid are having an impact on giving. ”The difference between Mr Easterly and myself is that I’m actually trying to get something done practically... But I know that since he has launched this tirade, it makes it harder to do.” He insists that for $16 a person a year, aid has ”done extremely well”. Trying not to fall into either the ”aid works” or ”aid fails” camp, I try to challenge Sachs, and say that just as it is probably wrong to pin African failure on aid, success stories are also not necessarily the result of aid. Sachs doesn’t engage. He is now on a mission and wants to ram his point home.
”People are dying in large numbers. The triumph of politics over economics is not that money is being lost in Africa, it is that money is not going in.” He vehemently denies that big aid has been tried before and not worked, and challenges me to name studies proving him wrong, knowing full well that I can’t.
We move on to talk about a specific project Sachs is currently involved in, Millennium Villages, where his ideas on fertilisers, malarial bed-nets and the like are tried on the ground. My less-than-ecstatic reaction to his reports of their success is clearly the same as that of many aid agencies. It instantly raises his hackles. I suggest there are many examples where success in pilots does not translate into something that can be replicated on a large scale, and that you don’t necessarily need to try something to know it won’t work. ”I’m sorry,” he is almost shouting now. ”That, I disagree with completely. That’s preposterous.”
Via Economist's View
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