Jeffrey Sachs' new book, and his vision of global
solutions for global challenges.

Read his article Common Wealth in Time Magazine.

Check out Sach's Common Wealth website
which features a forum and club newsletter.

Common Wealth:  Economics for a Crowded Planet
                    - by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Penguin Press, 2008

" ...we need to redesign our social and economic policies before we wreck this planet."
                  - foreword to Common Wealth by Edward O. Wilson

This is an unusual and radical book on economics by a Columbia University professor.  First, it displays not one graph of a supply demand curve.  Second it looks closely at population increase and limits to growth in arguing that cooperation must trump competition if the planet is to survive.  Sachs stresses that the market cannot solve all problems and suggests that private industry and national interests must subordinate themselves to overwhelming societal goals:

  "The challenges of sustainable development—protecting the environment, stabilizing the world's population, narrowing the gaps of rich and poor and ending extreme poverty—will render passé the very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources."  (Common Wealth in Time, March 24/08,  p.28)

Even the book's title Common Wealth is an unusual choice for an American academic, considering that in a less individualistic country like Canada, the term Cooperative Commonwealth Federation went out of fashion many decades ago.  Yet Sachs calls for global cooperation, posits common wealth as a goal, and also discusses regional integration and subsidiarity as solutions.

Most books on economics refuse to stray into politics but Sachs takes issue with a misguided counterproductive American foreign policy based on military hegemony.  The U.S. must revert to an inclusive multilateralism that focuses on solving the great challenges that threaten the planet's existence:

  "Security is a daily challenge to be achieved through cooperative efforts, not a prize to be won by a decisive military battle or change of regime." (p.282)

In fact, the solution to the world's problems requires a reorientation of American action so that it will underpin the achievement of Millennium Development Goals.  The cost would be less than a fraction of the budget of the U.S. military:

"If the trillions of dollars that the U.S. is squandering in Iraq was instead being invested in clean energy, disease control and new, ecologically sound ways of growing food, we wouldn't be facing the cusp of a rapidly weakening dollar, soaring food and energy prices and the threats of much worse to come." (Common Wealth in Time, March 24/08,  p.28)

Sachs sees three big challenges that threaten the planet's future: 

a.  how to devise new systems of energy, land and resource use that will avert climate change and species and ecosystem destruction

b.   how to stabilize world population at 8 billion or below, and

c.   how to end extreme poverty.

Solutions are available and precedents abound.  The eradication of smallpox is an example of how a significant goal was set and met.  The four elements necessary for success are having a clear objective, an effective technology, a clear implementation strategy and a source of financing.

 The core of Sachs' book consists of several chapters that detail how each of the major problems can be solved by existing methods assuming political will.  Climate change can be avoided through carbon collection and sequestration, the use of hybrid cars, a carbon tax and tradeable permits.  Population can be stabilized by better education and legal protection for women, better access to family planning, and social programs that provide for people in their old age.  Extreme poverty can be ended by a  increased investments in agricultural production, better education and health care, and better infrastructure as exemplified by Millennium Development Villages.

But global cooperation among nations will be instrumental to carrying out these initiatives:

"Intergovernmental processes must also change in fundamental ways.  The European Union is surely the harbinger of further regional integration.  As our problems have become global, old nation-state boundaries have become too small to provide many of the public goods required at a transnational scale.  The EU not only makes war unthinkable among its member states but also provides critical Europe-wide investments in environmental management, physical infrastructure, and governance 'software' such as monetary policy, food safety , and financial market regulation.  Other regions in the world, notably Africa, will follow Europe's lead in forging a much stronger transnational organization." (p.333)

In addition to calling for better regional arrangements, Sachs also demands UN reform:

".. the deepest measure of UN success will be whether the Millennium Promises are sustained over time as shared active global goals and whether these goals are achieved in practice.  Given the centrality of the United Nations to this overarching challenge, the UN itself needs to be reformed to fulfill these leading tasks."  (p.335)

Sachs also recognizes that global management must be democratically-based:

"These transnational organizations have had a difficult time achieving direct democratic engagement of the people.....  Part of the answer is to empower transnational democratic institutions such as the European Parliament." (p.333)

For those of us supporting the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (detailed at www.unpacampaign.org), this is a welcome statement since the UNPA is the logical extension and political counterpart of Sach's economic prescription for the world.  A Parliamentary Assembly at the UN would act as a needed symbol of global community, a global conscience to make sure the UN does the right thing about the environment and poverty, and a channel for civil society to apply pressure for greater control and accountability.

This is a very optimistic book.  Challenges are opportunities:

"Ours is the generation that can end extreme poverty, turn the tide against climate change and head off a massive, thoughtless and irreversible extinction of other species." 

Of course, if we don't succeed, the implication is plain.  That species extinction could well include those smart guys homo sapiens.

Sachs ends his book by noting that great social transformations such as the end of slavery, the women's and civil rights movements, and the end of colonial rule all began with public awareness and engagement.  Sachs offers us various actions we can take as individuals to build a world of peace and sustainable development.   Sachs calls upon us to be "citizens of the world" (p.336), a call that echoes down through history from the time of Socrates.

Common Wealth is in many ways a revolutionary book at a time when a revolution in outlook is vital to humankind's survival.  The era of exponential economic growth is over; the open frontier is gone; we must now learn to practice a new economics more appropriate for a crowded planet.  This is an economics that will require democratic supranational cooperation, a goal that World Federalists will gladly applaud and are well poised to champion. 

                                                                                                                      -  Larry Kazdan