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Science to Save the World
« on: 2003-01-20 08:03:16 » |
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[rhinoceros]
The following article from last month's issue of Scientific American had some interesting parts. This guy, Jeffrey D. Sachs, has been working as an advisor to Kofi Anan, among other things.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=8&articleID=00078AD2-C873-1DF7-9733809EC588EEDF
Science to Save the World
Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs thinks the science and technology of resource-rich nations can abolish poverty, sickness and other woes of the developing world
<snip>
His extensive travels have led him to realize the importance of geography, he informs me as we wait for his first appointment on a brilliant September morning. "It isn't possible to do good economic development thinking without understanding the physical environment, deeply, in which economic development is supposed to take place," he says. He complains that this "physical framing" is hardly considered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, nor is it taught to graduate students in economics.
As a result, "the physical scientists inherently feel that public policy somehow passes them by," Sachs remarks. "They feel politicians neglect a lot of the important messages or don't understand the risks, say, of anthropogenic climate change or of biodiversity depletion." Yet he has often encountered a resistance among social scientists, who believe everything is at root a political problem.
<snip>
"The rich are already rich enough to be able to end poverty."
One of Sachs's first international triumphs was as an economic adviser to the government of Bolivia from 1986 to 1990, when he helped to bring down that country's inflation rate from 40,000 percent a year to 10. But his role as leading economic adviser to Russia in 1992 and 1993 has drawn criticism: advice such as the elimination of price controls and of subsidies to unprofitable state enterprises had proved successful in eastern European governments but was fruitless in Russia's tumultuous transition to capitalism.
<snip>
Prominent in Sachs's frequent op-ed pieces is the inadequacy of foreign aid in light of the tremendous problems affecting the developing world-- the genesis of which, he says, was the American use of foreign aid as a tactical tool during the cold war. The strategy, he thinks, remains in play.
"So far the United States remains committed to gimmickry rather than real solutions. In the short term the U.S. is courting a worldwide backlash of anti-Americanism" that nontravelers don't recognize. And he sees the U.S. eventually suffering from its failure to address the collapses of governments, failed economies, mass refugee movements, the spread of disease and terrorist activities arising from such conditions-- not to mention the longer-term risks of climate change, biodiversity loss and the depletion of vital biological resources
<snip>
Sachs is not a fan of unfettered capitalism. "I don't believe in free markets for health care and science policy," he says. Long fascinated by the debate between capitalism and socialism, the Detroit native studied economics at Harvard all the way to his Ph.D. in the field; he received tenure there at the age of 28.
<snip>
He sees many underlying trends that are very positive, especially the mobilization of science and technology around the world. "The rich are already rich enough to be able to end poverty. But we have the capacity to wreck things," too, he states.
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