Jeffrey Sachs' Reith Lecture 5 - Global Politics in a Complex Age

This is the 5th and last of a series of 5 lectures broadcast by Radio 4 in the UK and given by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. This particular lecture was broadcast from The Assembly Hall, Edinburgh.

Introduction
SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, the erstwhile home of the Scottish Parliament, for the last in this year's series of Reith Lectures. We've chosen Edinburgh as a finishing place because this was the city where the economist Adam Smith, one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, set out his ideas on how to create free markets for the benefit of us all. Our lecturer, Jeffrey Sachs, takes some of his inspiration from Smith's ideas, and tonight this connection comes into full view as he explains how the countries of the world must find a new political framework in order to manage the business of international co-operation.

So far in these lectures he's explained how we should re-balance our world as the economies of the East rise to match those of the West, and how we must eradicate poverty and improve the environment, measures which are essential, he argues, for our survival.

Tonight he turns his attention to the processes required for achieving all of this. He's calling for a new politics for a new age. Ladies and gentlemen will you please welcome the BBC's Reith lecturer 2007, Jeffrey Sachs.



Full transcript follows......

Lecture
JEFFREY SACHS: The arc of the Reith Lectures began in the Royal Society in London, under the gaze of Isaac Newton, and in the presence of some of today's leading scientists. More than any other force, science has created the modern world. And today, science-based technologies link the world together and fuel the economic ascendancy of the ancient civilization of China, the site of our second lecture. But globalization brings the risk of new conflicts as well, and the hope still unfulfilled of a world at peace, the aim of the United Nations, in my own home city of New York, where I gave the third lecture. Only solutions to the great gaps of rich and poor will save us from war. London, the capital city of the first Industrial Revolution and where conscience stirred 200 hundred years ago to abolish the slave trade, was the site of last week's lecture.

It is therefore fitting, indeed some might say the work of an invisible hand, that we conclude the Reith Lectures here in Edinburgh. For here in Scotland, in the 18th century, globalization was first perceived for all its transformative potential, and also for its potential dangers. Here lived the most brilliant exponents of the radical idea that an interlinked world could produce unprecedented material wellbeing and rights for all. Edinburgh and Glasgow were still in the early stages of their new vocation as great centres of global commerce, offering an early window on the emerging global economy and global society. And none gazed so wisely and so humanely on the world as David Hume and Adam Smith.

Here is one of Adam Smith's astounding insights on globalization:
"The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind… By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants, to increase one another's enjoyments, and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial."

Yet, Smith noted, while Europe thrived, the native inhabitants of the East and West Indies suffered under the burdens of European conquest and impunity. Smith looked forward to a day when an "equality of courage and force" would lead all nations into a "respect for the rights of one another." He judged that:
"nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and . . . an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries . . . "

Globalization, in short, would empower the weak and protect their rights. Smith's genius and decency inspire us two-hundred and thirty-one years later. Rather than glorying in the benefits of globalization for Britain - a kind of self-help book for early empire -- Smith took a global view, and looked forward to the day when free trade and the spread of ideas would eventually produce an equality of courage and force around the world, so that the benefits of globalization would be shared by all.

Our challenges today are the same as in Smith's day, though even greater in range, scale, and intensity. The world is bursting at the seams, in population, environmental stress, cultural clashes and the gaps between rich and poor. How can globalization be made to work for all? What kinds of politics are needed for an interconnected world? Since our politics have veered off course, what can bring us back to safety for all?

In a much more interconnected world than Smith's, we will need much more than an equality of force to see us through. We need active cooperation on three fronts: to curb our destructive effects on the environment; to prevent war; and to address the needs of the poor, and especially the poorest of the poor. What politics can accomplish all of this?

The markets alone won't suffice. Nor will the fear of a balance of power. We need active cooperation, but in a world that lacks a single political center of gravity, and with the pervasive limitations of international institutions. Our current correlation of political forces and institutions is not delivering. Until recently, much of the world may have looked to the U.S. for such leadership, but those days are past. The U.S. and E.U. together are a mere 11 percent of the world's population, and will diminish significantly in relative economic weight in the coming decades.

Some in the world long today for a global government, but this too is no answer. With a single global government -- even if it were somehow achieved -- there would be no safety valve from global despotism. We want global cooperation but not through the straightjacket of a single sovereign power.

John Kennedy, you will recall from an earlier lecture, called peace a process, a way of solving problems. I want to consider global cooperation in the same way. Global cooperation is not an event, a strategy, or a set of treaties. It must be a process, a way of life.

There is no full blueprint for cooperation in the 21st century, nor can there be. But here is how I propose that we start.

In the past fifteen years, the world's governments agreed on a set of goals. They agreed to protect the environment, to fight the spread of nuclear weapons, and to fight poverty. Six specific agreements stand out as crucially important. Three were signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio - to fight climate change, to fight the loss of biodiversity, and to combat desertification. Two nuclear agreements came a few years later - to extend the ban on proliferation, and to ban nuclear tests. Last came the Millennium Development Goals in September 2000, to slash extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015.

Taken together, I call these six commitments our Millennium Promises. They were undertaken in the shadow of the new Millennium, when the world yearned for meaningful commitments by our leaders.

My proposal is simple. We should pursue global cooperation by fulfilling our Millennium Promises. These promises must be our compass. They enable us to steer in an age of complexity. Our most basic task is to hold our governments, each other, and of course ourselves, accountable to our mutual commitments.

Yet most people haven't a clue as to what we've promised. This is no accident. Many of our leaders also do not care to remind us. Our governments do not know how to deliver on these promises, and so they mainly shirk them. George Bush, for example, in six years of office, has run away from the challenge of climate change. He has never told the American people that the U.S., like 190 other countries, is already committed by international treaty law to stabilize greenhouse gases in order to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic [that is, manmade] interference with the climate system," under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. That treaty was signed, ironically, by the President's own father in 1992. The U.S. public doesn't realize that such commitments are already U.S. law.

Or consider the financing needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005, the G8 promised to double aid to Africa by 2010, in support of the goals. Yet the newly released data on aid to Africa show that aid is stagnant, not rising, after correcting for flawed accounting of debt relief. Worse still, the G8 has resolutely been unwilling to set a specific year-to-year timetable for the doubling of aid, so that recipient countries cannot plan ahead on how that aid can be used. One senior official even suggested to me that to do so would be wrong, because it might make the recipients too habituated to the aid. In other words, it's okay to announce the doubling of aid, and then to leave it as a riddle, lest it be taken too seriously by the intended recipients.

Or consider the commitment in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty for all nuclear powers to work toward complete disarmament. The nuclear powers honor the parts of the treaty limiting the spread of weapons to others, but reject the parts of the treaty that apply to themselves.

Or consider, finally, the commitment under the Convention on Biological Diversity, "to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss . . . as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth." This crucial goal, undertaken in the shadow of a massive extinction of species caused by human destruction of habitats, is probably the least known of all our Millennium Promises. But isn't my argument empty then - to propose that we solve the problems of global cooperation by taking seriously the very commitments that we have so far ignored? I think not. The key for us, the world's citizens, is to hold our governments accountable to the Millennium Promises, to understand why governments are paralyzed, and to clear the logjams in our path.

Our governments ignore the goals mainly because the political leaders don't understand how to achieve them. They hide out of fear, ignorance, short-sightedness, and the sway of vested interests. Meeting the goals requires the expertise of science and the mobilization of technology, yet our leaders are cut off from the requisite expert knowledge. The second step, therefore, is to bring global scientific expertise to the service of global problem solving.

This very approach is already proving itself in the case of climate change. Despite powerful vested interests that have tried to obscure the global scientific consensus on climate change, a rigorous process of scientific review known as the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has proven to the world that there is a strong scientific consensus that manmade climate change is serious, real, and accelerating. The IPCC is in the midst of unveiling its fourth major report, and the power of the scientific consensus is forcing the world's businesses and politicians to take note.

A similar commission was run, though on a one-time basis, in the case of biological diversity, in a project known as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. It documented both the human-made destruction of biodiversity, and ways to address the crisis. And in the case of the Millennium Development Goals, I myself was honored to direct the UN Millennium Project on behalf of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. The U.N. Millennium Project brought together more than 250 experts in development - in food production, malaria control, AIDS control, water and sanitation, education, and more - to show how the Millennium Development Goals can be accomplished. These recommendations were adopted at the 2005 U.N. World Summit.

Scientific processes like the IPCC, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the U.N. Millennium Project, and a similar effort for nuclear non-proliferation, should become a basic feature of global good governance. Scientific panels on each major promise should report regularly to the world on risks, progress, and possible solutions. Politicians should be briefed by these expert communities each year when the politicians gather at the United Nations. Our governments should be reorganized so that they can absorb this expert knowledge, rather than operating on hunch and political calculation. And the world's public should use the results of the expert processes to hold our politicians accountable, and to push away the logjams caused by vested interests.

Once the problems are recognized, and the deep science is understood, it is far easier to come up with solutions, which typically require the application of new technologies at a scale to address the challenge. Those technologies exist, or can be developed. Public policies will be needed to get them into place.

Fortunately, governments will not need to do all of the heavy lifting. Individual champions of solutions can make great headway in demonstrating what needs to be done. New technologies for specific problems can be proved at a small scale and then taken to global scale. Social entrepreneurs from every sector can step forward with proposed solutions. The main role of government is stand prepared, with checkbook at hand and policy brief ready, to take working solutions to the needed scale.

Consider the case of public health. Countless advances in public health in recent years have combined global goals, social entrepreneurship, and public finance. The control of polio, down by a factor of more than 100 in the past 20 years, has been championed by Rotary International, in collaboration with the World Health Organization. The control of African River Blindness has been led by a partnership of Merck pharmaceutical company in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the World Bank. President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center have championed an alliance to eliminate Guinea Worm disease. And the list goes on.

Once a technology is proved - a new drug, an improved seed variety, a long-lasting bed net -- the challenge is scaling up. Markets will rarely suffice. In the case of extreme poverty and disease, the poor are too poor to pay for these solutions. In the case of the environment, green technologies often add to production costs, but in amounts much lower than the environmental benefits to society. Such costly technologies will be adopted on a large scale only if special public incentives are offered, such as a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, or a subsidy for clean energy, or a tradable permit to limit emissions.

I have described, in short, a practical process of global cooperation. Overarching goals are made - to curb climate change, save species, fight poverty, and more. Scientists then provide regular and systematic reviews, informing political leaders and winning the confidence of the global public, both through the international composition of the scientific bodies and the rigor of their work. Social entrepreneurs are encouraged to promote prototypes and working models - through a promise of glory, or prizes, or patents, or the joy of public service. Governments are required, under the weight of global treaties and public pressure, to scale up working models to meet the global goals. This might mean development aid, or permit systems, or direct regulations, or spending on research and development, or in the case of arms control, new methods of verification.

In recent years, the public has solved some mammoth problems in a decentralized manner - for example, producing an on-line encyclopedia that is updated in real time, and an open-source and non-proprietary computer operating system that is now used worldwide. I am arguing for open-source global cooperation as well, meaning a system in which all sectors are invited to offer solutions, under the guidance of an agreed set of targets. Starting with shared goals, backed up by regular and rigorous feedback from expert reviews, we can engender a worldwide outpouring of ideas, actions, and commitments from all parts of society - business, non-governmental organizations, and international agencies. Governments can stand ready to bring solutions to scale, through public finance and other kinds of incentives.

I am constantly asked whether corruption will defeat any such attempts to help the poor. I often convey my own experience, of the relative ease of getting bed nets and anti-malaria medicines and fertilizers and high-yield seeds to the poor, with a minimum diversion of resources. My own experiences inform my optimism, and give specific ideas about how to get the job done. But in the global approach that I am proposing, there is a better answer. If you don't like my solution, try to prove yours. Let us encourage any group to show a working model, against the backdrop of a global political commitment to take successes to scale. The International Red Cross, for example, has invented a new system for the mass distribution of bed nets in impoverished countries. Their system works. Now the budgets of the major donor countries, with a sense of urgency, should support the International Red Cross in scaling up its proven methods.

FDR said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. John Kennedy said that to believe that war is inevitable is a dangerous, defeatist view. I say that cynicism is our worst enemy today. We must build on our successes, not feed our doubts. We have declared our goals and commitments, our Millennium Promises, but we lack the confidence to implement them. We have been flying blind, but expertise - and proven experience - can restore our sight.

The costs of addressing climate change, I have noted, will likely be less than 1 percent of our annual world income, and perhaps much below that. The costs of ending extreme poverty, too, are below one percent of rich world income. Biodiversity conservation, the studies have shown, is far below the first two costs, a slight fraction of a percent of income, if that. And disarmament, when based on global trust and treaties, will save money, lots of it, that is now directed to the useless and dangerous stockpiling of weapons, nuclear and other. We easily waste more in mistrust and military outlays than the costs of achieving our Millennium Promises.

There are countless ways for you to get involved in solving the great challenges of our time - the end of poverty, the protection of the environment, or the control and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Some of you will contribute funds to buy bed nets and medicines for the poor. Many students will volunteer their time in an impoverished country, learning lessons for a lifetime about our mutual interconnectedness. Each citizen should press his or her government to fulfill its obligations, and our Millennium Promises. Businesses can share their path-breaking technologies with the poor. Professional organizations - of lawyers, doctors, architects, scientists, athletes, artists, musicians - can reach across political lines to deepen friendships and understanding with people in Iran, or Palestine, or other places of high tension today.

The internet and videoconferencing can make all of this connection and problem solving vastly easier. Classrooms can be global, connecting children in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. in common learning. Our parliaments can and should be linked by videoconferencing, so that we can have global parliamentary sessions and even global votes. Perhaps a synchronized vote by dozens of parliaments in early 2003 would have helped to keep the U.S. and U.K. out of the terrible blunder of the Iraq War.

Great cities, such as this one, must also play a role. Global society is ever-more organized around a network of regions rather than nations -- centers of learning, science, trade, and tourism which connect disparate populations. Great creativity, architectural energy, and economic dynamism are associated with cities and their environs. And therefore the people of Edinburgh, New York City, Barcelona, Dubai, or Beijing, can take on special challenges of making connections and seeking solutions with the people of Nairobi, La Paz, and Timbuktu.

What I can tell you, with certainty, is that there is a role for everybody and every community, and a need for everybody to become engaged. You must be the peacemakers, development specialists, ecologists, all. Do not lose heart. Remember, as John Kennedy told us, "our problems are manmade - therefore they can be solved by man." And remember what his brother Robert Kennedy reminded us:

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against an injustice, he sends forward a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

I hope and believe that from Edinburgh, this great home of the Enlightenment, the energy for a globalization of justice, peace, and prosperity will radiate to all, and in Adam Smith's humane vision we truly will learn to "relieve one another's wants" in all parts of our world.

(APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much indeed. Let me invite our audience now, here in the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, to examine and question those propositions. So let's begin then with John Curtice, who's Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University. Professor Curtis your question please?

PROF. JOHN CURTICE: You've emphasised more than once in your lecture the importance of publics holding governments to account in the delivery of the various goals such as climate change that you talked about, but can I suggest to you that perhaps that rather than necessarily being the solution, the public might actually be the problem. What guarantee do we have that publics will necessarily sign up to these various objectives, perhaps particularly the publics of countries such as India and China, who might say to themselves, well actually what's most important to me at the moment is not necessarily reducing the problem of the climate, which the United States and Europe is responsible for, but actually finally achieving the material wealth that we've for so long been denied?

SUE LAWLEY: How do you overcome self-interest, Jeffrey, in the interests of the common good?

JEFFREY SACHS: Interestingly, I come from a country where the business community is way ahead of the politicians, and the public also is now clamouring for action. Now in the case of India and China, they have every reason to take this issue seriously. I would argue that the environment is actually right in the front here, it is probably the most decisive issue that both of those mega-populations will face in the challenge of achieving the economic development that they seek. In India the absence of water has become a top issue, with the suicides of farmers in the drought-stricken areas, and this is as painful and dramatic and headline an issue as one has. So I believe that what has paralysed this process is not an intrinsic lack of interest or a sense that self-interest should keep one away, but if there is that sense of self-interest I'm arguing that it's basically because of ignorance of the underlying facts.

SUE LAWLEY: Does that explanation work for you Professor Curtis?

PROF. JOHN CURTIS: I think it does help but it is worth bearing in mind, I mean you are currently in a city which not recently its public rejected the idea of charging motorists to come into the city in order to reduce congestion, so even in a relatively well-educated city, the short-term interest overcame what I suspect you might regard as the general interest of reducing the level of traffic. I mean the public doesn't always force politicians to go down the track that you're suggesting.

JEFFREY SACHS: That's why we felt it was especially urgent to have the last lecture here.

(LAUGHTER)

SUE LAWLEY: But the general point is there, isn't it? I mean how can you expect these vastly different countries in the world that have such deep and strange differences to co-operate in any kind of period of time that's worth talking about?

JEFFREY SACHS: My essential proposition through these lectures has been that in these three crucial areas, of environment, war and peace, and extreme poverty, we are facing life and death issues. We are not facing normal politics. We are, as I called it, facing a world bursting at the seams. And I think that we recognise that much in having a whole world adopt these goals. Then we, in our lazy manner, or in our fearful manner, or in our ignorant manner, or in our cynical manner, somehow slide away from them, and the proposition that I'm making is, let's take seriously what we have said, because we said those things for deadly serious reasons.

SUE LAWLEY: I see Professor Sir Bernard Crick, the political theorist, putting his hand up here.

PROF. SIR BERNARD CRICK: It seems to me that this is sort of H.G. Wells re-born - that scientific wisdom can replace politics. These are surely political problems, and you seem to have you know skipped entirely from the logic of politics into, if you don't mind my saying, standing with both feet firmly planted at mid-air of the wisdom of scientists.

JEFFREY SACHS: I think when you review the words carefully, I certainly did not say that scientific wisdom could or should replace politics. What I said is that science should inform politics. We do need science. The idea that we can somehow intuitively find our way through these challenges I find to be completely off the mark. With six and a half billion people in the world, with the ecological pressures that we face, with the challenges of extreme poverty, we'd better invoke expertise, because I see what happens when only hunch is used, and the results are miserable. We need to get science systematically into policy thinking and policy knowledge, and that's why I'm trying to think of processes and institutions that can help the public to understand. After all we did not say that the IPCC, this inter-governmental panel on climate change, should decide our climate policy. Indeed they're not even allowed to make policy recommendations. They are to inform the public. So I'm looking for science that informs politics, not science that replaces politics.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to take a couple more points on this area and then I'm going to move it on. Sir?

JOHN HALDANE: John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy, University of St Andrews. This is a very ambitious range of goals, that it's hard to see how these could be realised by anything other than global agencies, but this at a time when there is declining participation in the political process, particularly in Western countries. And my concern here would be that in the absence of largescale political participation on behalf of these kinds of goals, the danger is at the end of the day that there's a kind of utopianism that may turn itself into either a mass bureaucracy or a certain kind of global tyranny.

JEFFREY SACHS: Well I explicitly argued against that approach. What one needs in almost everything that I talked about, whether it's environmental action or help for the poorest of the poor, local solutions, often that require international finance, but not large bureaucracies. We need indeed to find mechanisms along Smith's market lines, but understand that we can't just do this in an undefined system without goals. It is precisely to mix global goals and local solutions.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to take a point there.

KHADIJA BAH: My name is Khadija Bah, and I was the ... advisor to the Millennium Project. I just want to again raise the issue of the self-interest and politics of the donor. In 2005 we worked very hard, and there were African countries who were ready, and yet despite all the promises it's still business as usual. I just want you to comment - what has happened since the two years we worked so hard?

SUE LAWLEY: Jeff, briefly if you would because as you know only too well, and as our listeners will know, we covered this subject very thoroughly in our last lecture.

JEFFREY SACHS: Briefly, promises of importance were made and have not yet been delivered. But we can't give up, and we should understand politics is hard, this is a fight, and two years is two years too long for millions of people who died in the interim because the help did not get started. But on the other hand we still have all to work for, we still have time to achieve these goals.

SUE LAWLEY: Let me bring in Pat Kane, who's a musician and a writer. Mr Kane, your thought.

PAT KANE: Hi. Jeffrey, you've talked about open source global co-operation and you gave two examples of those kinds of information networks - Wikipedia and open source but also things like email, blogging etc, which are crucial to this new mass decentralised political awareness that you invoke, that you think is so necessary, I mean how we will form this global citizenship is through these means. But are you aware of how vulnerable these networks are to vested interests, whether they're government interests, commercial or corporate, who would seek to reduce that openness? I mean I think the most obvious example are the restrictions that Western search engines agree to in places like China. Do you have any ideas about how to defend not just the open structures but the open values of the net?

JEFFREY SACHS: Well that's a great question. I think we are in a period, fortunately, where the technologies are running ahead of the would-be controllers, and while China and others block internet sites, new ones pop up a lot faster than they can be blocked. What my colleagues in science, and one of the colleagues that I revere in science, down the block from me, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, has done, is champion public access for all scientific information, in what's called public library of science. And he is taking that on, and has turned the publishing world upside down in a way by massively increasing the free availability of this vital knowledge for the world. You're right that we have to watch out in these values. We have to protect that, we have to defend it, but fortunately the technology is giving us a huge push forward, and I think we can keep ahead on this one.

SUE LAWLEY: Any points on that before I move on? No? Okay, I'm going to call in here Trevor Royle, a writer and historian and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Scotland.

TREVOR ROYLE: I was very impressed by what you said about global hegemony. You described it almost as an interlinked world. It's an ideal I think which we'd all probably want to aspire to. But isn't it true, when push comes to shove, that two other factors come into account? The first of these is national interests, and the second of these is geography. I attended the G8 at Gleneagles and it seemed to me that the politicians there were very very long on promises and very short on action. Isn't that always going to be the case? I'm thinking in terms of Darfur, Zimbabwe and other problems in Africa.

SUE LAWLEY: It's been a theme of these lectures really hasn't it, this scepticism about big promises never being translated into action, Jeff, and as you said yourself in the lecture just now, you know the OECD countries are just not putting their money where their mouth was in 2005.

JEFFREY SACHS: Of course, my whole theme was that we have to badger our governments to get them to follow through on their words. Now let me also add quickly that I believe that some of these situations are not simply as transparent as they look, and that's where I would invoke again expertise as being vital, and I'll take Darfur just as an example. What is in essence happening in Darfur, in my opinion, is that seven million Darfurians do not have enough water, and enough food, to survive. That problem needs to be addressed first and foremost, in my opinion, as recognising that those people are among the very most desperate in the world. They are hungry, they are desperate, and what they don't need, in my view, is simply sanctions and peacekeepers. That will never solve these problems. What they do need is a development approach. One of the odd things about this world I've found in my twenty-five years of work on economic development, is that the war and peace community, so called, and the development community, almost never speak. There are no links between them. If there's a conflict, call in the generals, never call in the hydrologist. Of course we need to hold our governments accountable - that's my theme. Let's focus on our core goals and demand and demand and demand follow through, but realise they don't know what they're doing. So we have to help our governments at the same time as badger them, to get the job done.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to come to a question here on the front row. Sir?

MR BRAMS HOFMANS: My name's Bram Hofmans, a final year politics student at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Sachs, basically you describe what you believe to be a blueprint for world action on all these global challenges that you described at the beginning of the talk, and in response to a previous question you mentioned that by 2015 these global challenges could be tackled by the global community. Do you still think that a timescale of 2015 is realistic? Thank you.

JEFFREY SACHS: Thanks a lot. Let me give an example. We're working in a project that I have undertaken with a number of colleagues in villages across Africa, that are hungry, and where people are dying of undernourishment and infectious disease. It takes just one growing season, just one growing season, to triple the food supply. Why? Because the reason that people are hungry is that they're too poor to get the kind of seed and fertiliser that could actually give them enough to eat and to earn an income, and to get them started on a path of development. It's not ten years of work, it's three months of work. It takes just a day, incidentally, to cover a district with bed nets. I'm not talking about ten years, twenty years, thirty years of utopian processes, I'm talking about very practical things right now.

SUE LAWLEY: But Jeff when you go to meetings, as you do regularly, in the UN, with the G8, in governments around the world, are you encouraged by what you hear? Do you have any kind of sense that the kinds of processes that you've been advocating here this evening could be brought about, that you might even begin to be pushing at an open door, or do you sense that you've just got to keep shouting from the rooftops in the way that you do if anything is going to be achieved in the timescale that it needs to be achieved?

JEFFREY SACHS: There is no guarantee we will honour our promises, that's for sure. This world has every capacity to go way off the rails. We have every capacity to create incredible damage in the world. I am not predicting success, I am not predicting failure. Rather than trying to make a forecast, I'm encouraging us to get on with the job of getting it done, because in the end this is not about a prediction, and it is not a spectator sport, it's about our choice, how we view our lives, how we view our responsibilities, how we view the fate of the planet.

SUE LAWLEY: Jeffrey, your lectures have been an inspiring call to arms if I may say so, one which has been listened to intently as we've travelled with you around the world. Inevitably people will go on having questions and criticisms about the ideas that you've put forward, but nobody doubts that the world in which we live is on the brink of fundamental change, and you've certainly provided us with a thought provoking and highly original framework for the important debate about the future for all of us on this planet. And so I'd like to say very much, Jeffrey Sachs, BBC Reith lecturer 2007, thank you very much indeed. (APPLAUSE)

Jeffrey Sachs' Reith Lecture 4 - Economic Solidarity for a Crowded Planet

This is the 4th of a series of 5 lectures broadcast by Radio 4 in the UK and given by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. This particular lecture was broadcast from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London - SOAS

Introduction
SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London - SOAS, as it's more commonly known. It's part of London University, and it's Britain's leading academic institution, dedicated to the study of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It's an appropriate place to be holding the fourth of this year's Reith Lectures, as Jeffrey Sachs turns his attention to one of the defining problems of those parts of the world, extreme poverty. To give it its economic definition, people who are forced to live on less than a dollar a day. As the world converges and grows richer, its newfound wealth, argues Sachs, threatens to be fatally undermined by the vastness of the terrible poverty it leaves behind. We have to rescue the poor and the failing communities in which they live, if we're to enjoy the fruits of economic globalisation. It can be done, he says. To explain how, and why, please would you welcome the BBC Reith lecturer 2007, Jeffrey Sachs.



The full transcript follows......

Lecture
(APPLAUSE) The end of poverty - by the year 2025. It's seems like an outlandish claim, an impossible dream. But it's within reach. It is a scientifically sound objective. And it is the most urgent challenge of our generation.

In fact, if we in the rich world fail to take up this challenge, we will imperil ourselves and the world. A crowded world, one that is "bursting at the seams," cannot afford to leave millions to die each year of extreme poverty without imperiling all the rest.

John F. Kennedy, whose vision of the possible inspires these lectures, put it this way in his Inaugural Address in 1961:

'To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required-not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.'

In my last lecture, in New York, I talked about war and peace and about our extremely dangerous tendency to define the world as "us versus them." Because of that tendency, war can erupt as a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict between mutually suspicious groups.

Yet war can also erupt as a result of the collapse of an impoverished society, one suffering the scourges of drought, hunger, lack of jobs, and lack of hope. Ending poverty is therefore a basic matter of our own security.

Darfur, Somalia, Afghanistan. These are all, at their core, wars of extreme poverty. So too, quite obviously, were the recent wars of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, and many others. The U.S. has just established a new military command in Africa, declaring Africa to pose new security threats to the U.S. But even as the U.S. spends more than $600 billion on the military, and even as U.S. counterinsurgency forces spread out across the impoverished stretches of the Sahel, the U.S. will never achieve peace if it continues to spend less than one hundredth of the military budget on Africa's economic development. An army can never pacify a hungry, disease ridden, and impoverished population.

We need to understand the challenge of extreme poverty not only as a matter of ethics and politics, but also as a matter of science. We can and must achieve a much clearer understanding of how to end poverty, based on the best scientific evidence. We have powerful technologies that can be mobilized, and which can make a remarkable difference at a remarkable speed.

We can usefully start our diagnosis by understanding the progress that has been made. When John Kennedy spoke of the bonds of mass misery in 1961, close to half the planet was in extreme poverty, measured by the traditional standard of living on $1 per day or less. Today, the proportion of the world's population in extreme poverty is down to around one-sixth, approximately 1 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people. The absolute numbers of the poor are declining, and their proportion is declining even faster. Globalization has, on balance, helped the poor, especially in Asia, where economic growth and poverty reduction are proceeding at historically unprecedented rates. We have the wind in our sails, since world markets give a powerful impetus to the spread of technologies and the rise of income. Once countries get on to the ladder of development - exporting manufactures and services in world markets, and linked to the world in networks of production, trade, finance, and technology - they tend to make continued progress up the ladder. Market forces, based on saving, investment, trade, and technological advance take hold. The crisis of extreme poverty is centered in those regions not yet on the development ladder, stuck in extreme poverty and hunger, with only the weakest of links to global production - through primary agricultural goods and mineral resources.

Poverty is not yet declining in tropical Africa, and a few other places. Africa has not so much been harmed by globalization, as bypassed by it. The basic challenge is to help Africa and other still-impoverished regions onto the development ladder.

Consider some recent data, this time using the metrics of life and death rather than dollars. Life expectancy at birth is probably the best single indicator of overall human wellbeing that we have. Life expectancy is not only a crucially important goal in its own right, but is also an excellent indicator of overall social organization - for example, the quality of the health system, the presence or absence of war, the reach of infrastructure, and the extent of food insecurity. Life expectancy at birth is also relatively easy to measure and to compare across countries.

The worldwide improvements in life expectancy on the planet have been dramatic. In 1960, 105 countries, with two-thirds of the world's population, had a life expectancy at birth of less than 60 years. By 2004, that list had shrunk to only 47 countries, with a mere twelve percent of the world's population. And virtually all of those 47 countries are in Africa (with the exceptions being Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, and Papua New Guinea).

Why does Africa lag? Here is where the scientific evidence on extreme poverty is vital. The overwhelming non-scientific assumption held in our societies is that Africa suffers mainly from the corruption and mismanagement of its leaders. With the viciousness and despotism of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, it's an understandable view. Yet this seemingly self-evident view is wrong as a generalization. Zimbabwe may get the headlines, but there are many countries in Africa, like Tanzania and Mozambique just nearby, that have talented and freely elected governments struggling against poverty. But they too face great obstacles, and their people too continue to suffer from extreme deprivation.

Consider the fact that nine developing countries - with two in Africa - were tied with exactly the same corruption score in this year's Transparency International index. Specifically, Ghana and Senegal were assessed to be at the same level of corruption as Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru, and Saudi Arabia. Yet the two African countries have life expectancies of around 56 years, while all but one of the other countries have life expectancies of more than 70 years. On average, for countries with comparable corruption levels, Africa's life expectancy rates are nearly 20 years below the rest of the world's.

Africa's problems are not due mainly to corruption, but to its ecology, history, weak infrastructure, and burgeoning population growth. Moreover, once those underlying sources of extreme poverty and disease are scientifically identified, we can also identify the practical technologies and strategies needed to solve these problems, and thereby enable Africa like the rest of the world to break free of the poverty trap.

Africa, compared with other poor regions of the world, suffers from four enormous burdens, all of which are solvable with proven and relatively low-cost technologies.

The first is low food production. Africa is a hungry continent, with grain yields roughly one third of other developing regions of the planet. Part of the problem is Africa's age-old dependence on rain-fed agriculture in a savanna climate, where the risks of drought are ever present. Sub-Saharan Africa lacks the river-based irrigation systems of South and East Asia. Another urgent problem with Africa's agriculture is that Africa's soils have been depleted of nutrients because impoverished farmers have been unable to afford fertilizers to replenish their soils. Older techniques for replenishing soil nutrients, such as the rotation of farm lands, allowing the replenishment of nutrients on land left to fallow for 10 or 20 years, are no longer feasible. Rising land scarcity because of Africa's burgeoning population means that scarce arable land can no longer be left to fallow even for one year, much less a generation.

The second challenge is Africa's disease ecology, which leads to uniquely high burdens of tropical diseases, especially malaria. This again is a matter of ecology. Africa has a climate and species of disease vectors that contribute to its unique burden of tropical infectious diseases. These are controllable, but at much greater effort than needed in other parts of the world.

The third challenge is Africa's miserably deficient infrastructure, with the world's poorest network of roads, power, rail, and fiber-optic cables for internet. For many historical and geographical reasons, Africa's colonial powers did not build the roads, rail, and power grids that they did in other parts of the world.

The fourth challenge is the continuing surge of population, in which poor families are still having six or more children in rural areas. Fertility rates are still so high in rural Africa that populations are doubling each generation.

These challenges - food production, disease control, weak infrastructure, burgeoning populations - are not caused by corruption, but by ecology, history, and by the vicious cycle of extreme poverty itself. Each of these challenges is susceptible of utterly practical solutions, and in short order, but they require public-sector investments beyond the levels that impoverished African countries can afford.

African countries, in short, face a poverty trap. They can overcome impoverishment through identifiable and proven public investments, but these countries are simply too poor to undertake those investments out of their own resources. Nor are they creditworthy enough to borrow those resources from global capital markets, though these markets can help.

This litany of problems may seem overwhelming. Left alone, they will be. But each is actually solvable, and much more easily than is typically imagined. We've seen what can be done, for example, in our own Millennium Villages, a project that applies proven techniques to these very challenges in villages across a dozen countries of Africa. Here is what can be accomplished.

Powerful technologies, as simple as insecticide-treated bed nets and a new generation of anti-malaria medicines, can control malaria by 90 percent or more. Anti-retroviral medicines can make AIDS a chronic rather than fatal disease, and one with reduced stigma and much more chance of prevention. These successes, and many like them, have been accomplished in countless specific projects where donor funds have been made available, but not on a country scale or regional scale.

Current agronomic technologies can triple food production. The key in that case is to get smallholder farms the vital inputs of high-yield seeds, fertilizers, and small-scale water management techniques that can dramatically boost farm yields. Africa can and must have a Green Revolution as India initiated nearly forty years ago. Malawi has started this year, with a program to guarantee vital inputs for the poorest farmers. Food yields have soared, in a neighborhood of acute food shortages. And we should certainly remember that India's Green Revolution also depended on international aid in its early years. Virtually every country has needed a helping hand at some point. It's a rule of life.

Current technologies can extend roads, rail, power, and the internet even to the most remote regions. A satellite dish, or a mobile phone tower, can end isolation that might have seemed irremediable a generation ago.

The fourth challenge, excessive population growth, is similarly susceptible of practical and proven solutions. Fertility rates in rural Africa are still around 6 children or more. This is understandable, if disastrous. Poor families are worried about the high rates of child mortality, and compensate by having large families. Poor families lack access to contraception and family planning. Girls often are deprived of even a basic education, because the family cannot afford it, and are instead forced into early marriage rather than encouraged to stay in school. And the value placed on mothers' time is very low, in part because agricultural productivity is itself so low. With few opportunities to earn remunerative income, mothers are pushed - often by their husbands or the community - to have more children.

Yet, as shown by countless countries around the world, fertility rates will fall rapidly, and on a voluntary basis, if an orderly effort is led by government with adequate resources. Investments in child survival, contraceptive availability, schooling of children, especially girls, and higher farm productivity, can result in a voluntary decline in total fertility from around six to perhaps three or lower within a single decade. But these things will not happen by themselves. They require resources, which impoverished Africa lacks.

The world has committed, time and again, to help Africa accomplish these development objectives. We are pledged, all countries on the planet, to support the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals set in the year 2000 to cut poverty, hunger, and disease decisively by the year 2015. We are half way to 2015, but still far off the mark. Our governments talk, and they even begin to act, but they fail to act with the urgency and decisiveness required by the circumstances, and commensurate with our promises. And the urgency will grow as climate stresses multiply. The longer we wait, the greater is the suffering and the larger are the long-term risks and costs.

Success in the MDGs will require stronger actions on all fronts - by civil society, by businesses, by African governments and communities. I will speak about the roles of business, civil society, and each of us as individuals, in the final lecture. But success will also require finance, at a scale that can only be provided by official development assistance by rich country governments. Our governments have long promised to deliver 0.7 percent of rich-world GNP as official aid, but so far have consistently failed to do so.

The situation is absurd in many ways - at least 10 million people dying each year because the rich world refuses to spend 0.7 percent of GNP on aid! For Africa specifically, we would need around $70 billion per year to enable Africa to get on to the ladder of development. That's $70 per person per year from each of us in the rich countries. It's about 0.2 percent of our annual income. It's well under the annual cost of the Iraq War. Indeed, it's about 2 percent of the estimated wealth of the world's 1,000 billionaires. And consider that Wall Street and the City of London together took home Christmas bonuses of some $40 billion this past holiday season.

The deep question is why the rich countries, with so much wealth, are so irresponsibly and relentlessly neglectful, when the amounts needed are so small and the consequences of inaction are so catastrophic for all. Is this the fate of modern societies? Are our politicians inevitably distracted by local concerns, or by the illusions of war? Are our populations so jaded and cynical and uncaring as to make this neglect inevitable? The answer, thankfully, is no. Let's not over-generalize. Several of the world's wealthiest countries do honor their commitments. The key for us is to understand why they do, while the rest do not.

Five countries of Northern Europe have long met the 0.7 percent of GNP commitment. These are: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The European Union has now promised, once again, to do so by 2015. Yet the European Union obviously agonizes in this promise. The U.S. doesn't even agonize. It doesn't even try. The US will spend $600 billion on the military this year, but only $4 billion on African development. Moreover, senior U.S. officials vigorously reject the global standard of 0.7 percent in aid, even though the U.S. government signed on to that international target.

The striking thing about the aid performance is the very strong correlation between a country's international aid and its care for the poor at home. Countries that take care of their own poor also tend to help the world's poor. Countries that neglect their own poor tend to walk away from their international responsibilities as well.

In brief, the social welfare model of Northern Europe helps the poor both at home and abroad. The U.S. model, alas, leaves the poor to suffer their fate, both at home and abroad. Americans, as a result, are fearful of their economic future, as they are left to fend for themselves. They have little time for others. The world is seen as filled with threats, and of "us versus them," rather than with opportunities in an interconnected global society. The Nordic countries, by contrast, have the domestic security of social protection which they then seek to extend to the world.

The successes of the Nordic system are crucial for us to understand. Many on the political left admire the Nordic social welfare state, as do I. Yet they mistakenly believe that the Nordic countries are somehow anti-market and anti-globalization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, are all market-based economies, competing fiercely in world markets. They believe in open trade, and invest heavily in high technology and in R&D to keep their international competitiveness. But they have discovered that it is possible to combine market efficiency and open trade with strong social services and social protection. They have achieved, in short, a system of Economic Solidarity within a market economy. Rather than compromising their economic well being, these institutions of Economic Solidarity have strengthened the market system itself. The Nordic countries have not only eliminated poverty in their midst, and achieved the best health outcomes in the world. They have also fostered the confidence to extend such solidarity to the rest of the world.

No doubt, the Nordic successes have depended, in part, on their relatively small size and social homogeneity. Their levels of internal social trust are very high. Migration is putting that social trust under challenge. But even if their social homogeneity is not replicable elsewhere, their social trust can be. Perhaps the key to success, after all, in the 21st century will be building trust across ethnic and cultural lines, within our own societies, as well as across societies.

We can end poverty, at home and abroad, with the technologies and tools that we have, if we trust each other sufficiently, at home and abroad. As JFK said in the context of war and peace, we need not talk about blind trust, a naïve trust, a trust of dreamers or fanatics. We must seek a practical trust, built on specific institutions and specific ways of delivering help for the poor. Our economic solidarity must rely on scientific evidence and rigorous audits as much as on trust. But at the core of such institutions is the trust that we are all in this together, that our fates, economic and otherwise are shared, and that the defeat of poverty will be a victory of security for all on the planet.

My suggestions on Economic Solidarity therefore are the following.

First, let us embrace market economics - yes - but also recognize that free market economics are passé. We need an active role of the state, to help the poorest to break free of the poverty trap, and to help narrow the inequalities of a high-income market society.

Let us understand that economic solidarity is insurance for all, the poor and the rich. Our societies can be both productive and safe. If we invest in solidarity, we will also end up with a more caring society. It's not our poor versus the poor abroad. It is help and solidarity with both.

Let us resolve to honor our commitments in the fight against poverty, hunger, and disease. Our commitments are small compared with our vast wealth, and the benefits will be vast. We have the power to save millions of lives each year, to help slow a burgeoning population growth in the poorest countries, and to reduce, if not end, the conflicts and wars caused by extreme poverty, which threaten peace everywhere. This, truly, is the work of our generation.

In the next lecture, we will consider another lesson from the small Nordic countries. Small is beautiful in today's economies. These small economies are open to the world, but are also small enough to establish high levels of internal cohesion. They reap the best of a large open world economy and a strong home base.

The place for the "small" - our communities, regions, and cultures - in a large and interconnected world, will be among the themes that I will explore in the next lecture. More generally, we will explore how each of us can contribute to solutions at a time when our governments alone are surely insufficient to the task.

(APPLAUSE) SUE LAWLEY: Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much indeed. Now it's time for our cosmopolitan audience here at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to explore, endorse or challenge those views about the need and the means of ending extreme poverty. So I'm going to begin by inviting Karl Ziegler, who was once an adviser, I believe, to the President of Uganda, and he's founded an organisation called The Centre for Accountability and Debt Relief. Mr Ziegler, your question?

KARL ZIEGLER: Yes, thank you. I also am a founding Director here in the UK of Transparency International. Flight capital, capital flight, out of Africa today, is going up by leaps and bounds as their commodity prices are going up.

SUE LAWLEY: Is this money that goes to Swiss bank accounts you mean?

KARL ZIEGLER: Yes, well they, of course, go to Swiss bank accounts. Flight capital traced by the World Bank in 2004 was ninety-five billion dollars out of sub-Saharan Africa. 2005, the figure had erupted to a hundred and fifty billion.

SUE LAWLEY: Just so we're clear, for people who are not as close to the subject as you are, this is money that's gone in, given in aid which is siphoned out of Africa. Is that what you're saying?

KARL ZIEGLER: No, not simply aid, because as Jeff points out correctly the aid level is quite low, but he would love to see it expand and balloon. What I'm arguing is that the expanded aid going into sub-Saharan Africa, if his prescription were followed, would basically continue to go into flight capital. Under corrupt leadership in Africa money that goes in as aid is usually used to buy a new presidential jet, or increase the parliamentarians' salaries. I think you'll be more effective if you addressed those core issues.

SUE LAWLEY: So Jeff, you say the problem is not due to corruption. Here's a view that it absolutely is.

JEFFREY SACHS: Well, Karl and I have been arguing about this for years, and I'm glad that he had a chance to hear me tonight. These things are simply your way of saying that you think that everything necessarily has to be stolen rather than thinking about ways to help people that practically need the help to stay alive. We bring in bed nets, the bed nets don't get shipped to Swiss bank accounts-the bed nets could save millions if we took this seriously and if we stopped the clichés.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to give you a quick comeback on that Mr Ziegler - a quick one if you will.

KARL ZIEGLER: A very quick comeback is that essentially the poverty in Africa is… and it's not the white commentators like myself who comment on it, it's Africans who give the data, and basically demand change of leadership, because they say problems one, two and three, unlike your list of four, is the problem of corruption.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to call in the gentleman here, who's waving his hand at me.

JULIAN MORRIS: I am Julian Morris, from International Policy Network. The problem in Africa, as I see it, is one of too many big men trying to impose their will upon the people. It's the rule of big men, rather than the rule of law. Botswana has grown much more rapidly than any other country in Africa. The single simplest explanation for that is the institutions underpinning that. And the explanation for why the rest of Africa hasn't worked is because of the poor governance in those countries.

SUE LAWLEY: Jeff…

JULIAN MORRIS: What you're suggesting is that we give much money now, especially to the governments of Africa. I suspect that that will have the opposite effect to that intended, it won't encourage the rule of law, it'll have the opposite effect.

SUE LAWLEY: Jeff, I want you to react to that if you would.

JEFFREY SACHS: The single biggest reason for Botswana to have done well is that in the late 1960s they discovered massive amounts of diamonds in the Kalahari desert. Let's get real.

JULIAN MORRIS: How do you explain Nigeria's poverty then, because ... ... oil wells.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes let's please understand how Botswana got wealthy, because it's perfectly plain that it was very poor people living in the Kalahari desert, until the diamonds came. And with all that good governance, let's remember also that Botswana has the highest AIDS prevalence rate in the world. So let's not over-simplify that it's all just corruption and mismanagement. Sometimes it's other things as well. President Guebuza, President Kufuor, President Toure, President Kikwete, and many others are not big men. This is just a slur, and I'm surprised it's a slur here where you know Africa, and you understand it's fifty-four countries. It's not one mass of homogenous corruption.

(APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Let me just see if there's anybody in the floor really, general… On the point of corruption, I'd like some general views. The gentleman there, yes?

MAN: Yes, thank you. I'm from Africa, I'm from the Congo myself, and I believe that even the doubling of aid is not going to help at all, as long as the West doesn't drop all these trade barriers against African goods. And we are talking as if we are oblivious of history. We've just celebrated the bicentenary of the slave trade, how Africa's been always squeezed dry. Since the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism that is going on today. No single government in the West has tried to investigate the implication of ... in the Congo war, which made Britain, America, Belgium, France, rich in the very twenty-first century, now.

SUE LAWLEY: Jeff?

(APPLAUSE)

JEFFREY SACHS: I think the point - and I think there should be no doubt about it - governance, meaning our governance and governance in Africa, and help, meaning our help for Africa, are both part of the solution. Now on trade barriers, there's no doubt some huge abuse, as you say, and cotton is the most despicable of them all and one that affects the Congo. But what's also true is that in addition to the trade barriers, and I believe even larger, is the absence of basic infrastructure, because the power grid prevents reliable internationally competitive production, because the road network does not work effectively, because the rail network doesn't exist. So from my point of view, if we're going to get the trade going, which I believe is absolutely critical, we need to invest in basic infrastructure.

SUE LAWLEY: What people listening to this think to themselves is, look, as we know, the figure is over the past fifty years 2.3 trillion dollars has been given in aid somewhere out there - why hasn't anything moved on, why hasn't anything changed?

JEFFREY SACHS: That preposterous figure confuses everybody rather than illuminates. If you take 2.3 trillion dollars and you divide it by sixty years, and you divide it by three billion people in the developing countries, it comes out to thirteen dollars per person per year, that's all. We've spent seventeen trillion dollars on the military in the US alone during that period.

SUE LAWLEY: Okay we've got that point, I'm going to take a question…

JEFFREY SACHS: So, no but, so that is the point, this is playing games with numbers and games with lives, and we have to look at what's really needed, get down to the specifics, get down to the details, stop casting the aspersions on the corruption abroad and look at what can really save lives, raise food production, build infrastructure, and help get this region out of its poverty trap.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to go down to a question over here. Yes?

IMOGEN MOORE: Hi Professor Sachs, my name is Imogen Moore, I'm a postgraduate student here at SOAS and a former employee of the United Nations in a number of countries. I couldn't help but notice you've given us a number of statistics and figures relating to poverty, but you've made no reference to the voices and concerns of the poor themselves. Do you regard poverty as a technical problem to solve, or a partnership?

(APPLAUSE)

JEFFREY SACHS: Clearly I regard it as the most essential partnership on the planet, and I regard it as the most important thing we can do to get serious about this. Since I spend most of my time in villages and listening to people from the ground up, let me tell you what they're concerned about. They're concerned about their children dying, as they carry them on the backs ten kilometres to a clinic and the child's dead by the time they get there. They are concerned that they do not have enough to eat for three months before the next harvest. They are concerned that they cannot afford a treadle pump for supplementary irrigation during the dry spells that seem to come with increasing frequency in the savannah. There is not one step in the world, ladies and gentlemen, that can be taken without the leadership of the poor themselves. But I will say that this has nothing to do with denying people their opportunity; this is to give them something real so that they have tools to get out of this trap.

SUE LAWLEY: Let me bring in Roger Riddell, who was a Director of Christian Aid at one point I think, so he has experience in these matters. I mean there is a problem is there not at the giving end as well as at the receiving end. We've talked about corruption, it's the power of the donor that becomes a bit of a problem, and I think that's the area ...

ROGER RIDDELL: Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Sachs that more aid is needed, but if there's one thing we've learnt in the last thirty years of aid-giving, it's that aid is unlikely to work unless recipient countries are allowed to pursue development strategies which they have drawn up themselves, which they own, and are thus committed to. What makes you think that donor-driven, technocratic approaches will work today when donor-driven approaches in Africa have so singly failed in the past?

SUE LAWLEY: Jeff?

JEFFREY SACHS: I'm really incredibly surprised actually, at every one of these characterisations. The Millennium Development Goals are not met by the poor because they've been promised help which hasn't arrived. Every one of the countries where we're working through the United Nations, with Kofi Annan first, now with Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, where the Millennium Villages are operating, have governments that want nothing more than to achieve a two thirds reduction of child mortality, a three fourths reduction of maternal mortality, to cut hunger by half, to cut income poverty by half. They want these goals, they plead for them. We then make promises we'll double aid by 2010. Where are those promises? Nowhere to be found. Now, I know you work for this, but I think our message needs to be to our governments also - get on with it, fulfill the promises.

SUE LAWLEY: We have here someone from an international Catholic aid agency, Christine Allen, Director of Progressio. You work in the field, what's your experience?

CHRISTINE ALLEN: Thank you, Professor Sachs. I mean as you highlight, the people in the countries of the south are not stupid, they may be poor but they're not stupid, they have hopes and dreams and desires for their children like the rest of us. But I don't think we can ignore the issues about governance that we've highlighted, particularly in terms of corruption. I want to ask you what kind of changes will you see, what kind of challenges do you ask of governments who do aid provision, so that we can ensure that that aid actually really meets those that are poorest and marginalised?

JEFFREY SACHS: If you go to an African village and discuss these issues, which you do, and which I do all the time, let me say what comes up. They'd like to grow more food, they'd like not to be hungry, they'd like their children not to die of malaria, they would like safe water points, they would like some transport and communication. These are the things you hear everywhere. Let's not be confused by this. So what does it mean to have aid programmes that respond to those needs? It means to be practical, it means bed nets to fight malaria, high yield seeds, treadle pumps, vaccinations, anti-retroviral medicines, bore holes. Are those mere technocratic solutions? Well those are the things that poor people would like, their lives depend on it. Their lives can be saved by it.

SUE LAWLEY: How do we get through this, Jeff, is really what's being asked. Where's it going wrong and how do we get…

JEFFREY SACHS: I think that from my point of view there seems to be a pervasive misunderstanding, and that is that we're already doing so much, but we're not doing what they want. And this is absolutely not the case, we're doing so little, and also not what they want. That's the point.

(APPLAUSE)

JEFFREY SACHS: I don't understand the mindset, because I know the numbers. The numbers are that the total envelope of aid is twenty-five billion dollars for everything. Now start taking away from that the salaries of rich country consultants, take away the food aid, take away the padded debt relief numbers, and you're down to a few billion dollars. You may be at five to ten dollars left over per recipient in a situation where there is no power, water, bed nets, malaria control - it's a matter of arithmetic. The reason these things happen is not that we're doing something so large in some other area, believe me we're hardly doing anything. We have not stepped up to our promises and our commitments. It may be hard to hear.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to go for a quick comment, briefly if you would, sir.

ALISTAIR McFARQUHAR: I'm Alistair McFarquhar, retired, … from the University of Cambridge, but once the first economist working for government in Africa - with the possible exception of South Africa. Take the two biggest problems generally acknowledged, malaria and Aids. The problem with malaria is a failure of Western science and green politics to use DDT. Take the use of contraceptives to control Aids in South Africa - that's a combination of the juju and the Vatican Church. There's nothing complicated about it.

JEFFREY SACHS: We did not try for a long time to control malaria, and DDT is one possibility. It's only one of many tools and it's not appropriate in some places and is appropriate in other places. It turns out to be more expensive than long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets, less effective in some areas. So where you want to use that tool among many is a scientific and ecological question.

SUE LAWLEY: What about the juju and the Catholic Church?

JEFFREY SACHS: I think that, again, the South African position on AIDS has been despicable, and it's only recently changed. But as I hear all of these things I can tell you of twenty-five or thirty countries desperately trying to do the right thing. But AIDS treatment requires help and it requires financing, and it's only very recently that that has started. So in all of the statements that are made, there are fifty-four countries, very different circumstances, many countries desperately trying. The one thing that is relatively consistent though is that the level of our effort and attention is far below what we have promised and far below what's needed.

SUE LAWLEY: Okay we're going to have to end it there despite the many people who still want to speak. Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much.

Jeffrey Sachs' Reith Lecture 3 - The Great Convergence

This is the third of a series of 5 lectures broadcast by Radio 4 in the UK and given by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. This particular lecture was broadcast from Columbia University in New York

Introduction
SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to New York for the third in this series of Reith Lectures. We are at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, whose Director is this year's Reith lecturer, Jeffrey Sachs. The Earth Institute was set up to analyse, investigate, and most importantly, try to find solutions to the environmental and economic problems facing the world today. In his first lecture, Professor Sachs set out his argument that through international co-operation, the world can rid itself of disease, poverty and pollution. Last week in China he explained the role that it, the world's most rapidly developing economy, needs to play in this process. Tonight, on his home territory, he'll talk about the United States, a country at the zenith of its economic power, facing colossal changes as the emerging nations of Asia seek to take their turn on the world stage. What must America do? How should it behave? Here to discuss these questions is an audience of politicians, academics, students, and, if there is such a thing, ordinary New Yorkers. But first ladies and gentlemen please will you welcome the BBC's Reith lecturer 2007, Jeffrey Sachs. Our generation's challenge is of a planet bursting at the seams. There are 6.6 billion of us crowded on the planet today, and the numbers continue to rise. The UN has recently estimated that we will total 9.2 billion by 2050 if we maintain our current demographic trajectory. Unprecedented economic growth in Asia offers the vista of a richer world, indeed of shared prosperity around the planet. The end of extreme poverty is within reach. But unless we come to grips with the dangerous aspects of our technological prowess and demographic trends, we might instead face the prospect of an ecologically wrecked planet, one gripped by man-made climate change, the massive human-led extinction of other species, and the grave insecurity of a planet divided as never before between the extreme rich and the extreme poor. The hopes of shared prosperity could instead become a nightmare of shared insecurity.


The full transcript follows.....

Full Transcript
JEFFREY SACHS: I believe that we can find our way through this thicket, that we can solve even the toughest of these problems. Practical answers to the challenges of climate change, the conservation of biological diversity, extreme poverty, emerging epidemic diseases, and food insecurity are all within reach. President John F. Kennedy summed up this potential when he declared that

'Our problems are manmade - therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable - and we believe they can do it again.'

And of course Kennedy was right. We stand today on the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, a step towards human freedom that was won through an unrelenting campaign of social activists over entrenched economic interests. We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the independence of India, the 50th anniversary of the birth of independent Ghana, the first independent country in post-Colonial Africa. And of course we are at the 50th anniversary of the European Community, now the European Union. After a millennium of warfare in Western Europe, the very thought of conflict among Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and others is utterly unthinkable. As Kennedy said,

'However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbours. '

In these lectures I have been laying out my view of how we can best address global problems. The starting point, I believe, is a sound and scientific diagnosis of the problems we face, whether of climate, biodiversity, water, or extreme poverty. Next is public awareness. We live, fortunately, in an increasingly democratic age. Global problems can only be solved with global public understanding.

Next is the deployment of technologies to address the challenge. Though advanced technologies are sometimes considered to be a malign force, yet a further threat, they are of fundamental importance in enabling 6.6 billion people, and perhaps 9.2 billion people, to meet the twin aspirations of improved material life and ecological sustainability. Without improved technologies to raise food productivity, to use water more efficiently, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of energy, there can be no way to combine economic wellbeing and environmental sustainability.

Finally, there must come global agreement, implementing treaties such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and of course the Millennium Development Goals.

Ironically, to many of us on this planet, the first three steps - science, public awareness, and technological solutions - all seem within reach, while global agreements on how to respond seem impossible. The deepest skepticism, it seems, is about our very ability to cooperate, not about the technical solutions to our most challenging problems. Yet, to quote Kennedy once again, the belief that global cooperation is beyond our capacity is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable - that mankind is doomed - that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

When Kennedy spoke, large numbers of Americans thought that peace with the Soviet Union was impossible. They were wrong. So too are those today who believe that we can not agree to end poverty, fight climate change, and even to make peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Yet global cooperation is in fact difficult. It is a challenge that we have only sporadically achieved. We meet today at a time of another disastrous war, that is, another clear failure of global cooperation. The Iraq War not only kills by the tens of thousands, and maims by even more, but it distracts us from our much more vital tasks.

Global cooperation is at risk for three reasons. The most urgent is the ever-present threat and reality of war, born of the darker side of human nature. A second reason why cooperation fails is that in our interconnected world, the collapse of any single part of the world - even a place as isolated as Afghanistan - has implications for all of the world. Cooperation in an inter-connected world must therefore be comprehensive, something that our societies still do not appreciate or accept. We must care, and also act, in response to suffering in Sudan, or Yemen, or Gaza, or Papua New Guinea. A third reason for failure is sheer complexity. Our problems are now of global scale. The world is interconnected in unprecedented ways that require unprecedented strategies for global cooperation. Tonight I will focus on the first of these risks - the threat of war - leaving the challenges of failed and fragile states, and of global complexity, for later lectures.

Our gravest threat on the planet remains the threat of massive war. Our species is drawn to it like moths to a flame. We are not warlike by nature - that is far too simplistic - but we are vulnerable to the allure of war to solve problems. Half a trillion dollars later in Iraq, you might think that we would have been disabused. Yet even our home town press, the New York Times, recently (March 18, 2007) editorialized for a boost in the size of the standing army. This, indeed, would be a recipe doomed to fail. The military will not solve the problems that we face. Our money, training, and effort, can be much better invested elsewhere.

My worry is that we are gambling recklessly with a "2014" to match the year 1914. Let me explain. Nearly one hundred years ago, in 1914, the peace was sundered by the Guns of August, and the 20th century never quite recovered. World War I almost literally came out of nowhere, so much so that historians still debate why the war occurred. A happy march of soldiers to win each nation's honor within a few weeks turned into four years of mass carnage, the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust, and more. Our war in Iraq, our threats to Iran, and even the growing anti-Chinese sentiments in the well of the US Senate all raise the stakes of a similar disaster on our generation's watch.

We are not doomed to this outcome, but we can become the accomplices to it. Two deep aspects of human psychology are crucial here. The first is that human beings hover between cooperation and conflict. We are actually primed psychologically, and probably genetically, to cooperate, but only conditionally so. In a situation of low fear, each of us is prone to cooperate and to share -- even with a stranger. Yet when that trust evaporates, each of us is primed to revert to conflict, lest we are bettered by the other. Game theorists call this strategy "Tit for Tat," according to which we cooperate at the outset, but retaliate when cooperation breaks down. The risk, obviously, is an accident, in which cooperation collapses, and both sides get caught in a trap in which conflict becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that all-too-real nightmare, we end up fighting because we fear that the other will fight. This fear is confirmed by fear itself. Wars occur despite the absence of any deeper causes.

The second crucial piece of human psychology is that we are social animals, with a strong tendency to identify with an in-group. We classify ourselves as New Yorkers, or Americans, or Jews, or Muslims, or professors, or artists, or bankers. In most cases, we are a part of many groups. Our identities are multi-faceted, and that knits us together in overlapping webs of trust and shared regard. Yet in an environment of fear, a single in-group, a single "us" can suddenly take over. The world becomes divided between "us" and "them." Suddenly, we are Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, Hutus and Tutsi, Shiites and Sunnis. Peaceful coexistence over centuries becomes carnage over weeks and months. Psychologists have shown that a child's attachment to an in-group begins as early as age 6, and that fear of an out-group, especially a low-status outgroup, is manifested at that young age, and even at the unconscious level.

Put these two pieces - Tit-for-Tat strategy and "us versus them" logic -- together and we can see how the world confronts alternative futures. One possible future is a world in which trust builds trust, cooperation begets cooperation. Our identities are multiple. I may be a New Yorker, working at Columbia University, in partnership with my colleagues in Egypt and Jordan, to address problems of water and climate in the Middle East. That kind of multi-faceted identity is the road to peace, to a mid-century of prosperity, to an anniversary of 1914 that notes human folly and tragedy rather than human fate.

The other future, however, puts us into a world of spiraling conflict. Box cutters and hijacked planes bring death and disaster in New York City. We "retaliate" though in Iraq, which was not party to the attack, and thereby spread the conflict. We lump together a terrorist group, al-Qaeda, with states such as Libya, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, failing to recognize that states are much more complex and with varied interests that can be the subject of negotiation. Cooperation collapses. It's suddenly "us" versus "them." 2014 is no longer an anniversary, but our own seeming death wish. And in the meantime, while the fighting and insecurity escalates, we utterly neglect the problems of climate change, biodiversity conservation, extreme poverty, and the very goals that we have set ourselves for the new millennium. How true are John Kennedy's words of June 1963:

For we are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counter-weapons.

In President Bush's 2008 budget just submitted, military spending is $623 billion, more than all of the rest of the world combined, while aid to all of Africa is $4.5 billion. Inexplicably, Vice President Cheney accused the Chinese of a build-up of their military budget, though their military outlays are vastly lower than ours.

How then to break this dangerous cycle, one as threatening today as it was during the Cold War, and that is now marked by the grave perils of inter-religious hate and zealotry, a wider spread of nuclear weapons, and stronger global interconnections that amplify a conflict to all corners of the world? Again, we must take Kennedy's greatest insight, that "Peace is a process - a way of solving problems." Let's see how Kennedy applied that profound insight in his day, and learn to do it in ours.

Kennedy's speech on June 10, 1963, which I have quoted throughout this evening and throughout the Reith Lectures, was not only a scintillating exposition on peace, and not only a challenge to his generation to make peace, but was also part of the process itself, a way of problem solving. Kennedy literally used the speech to make peace.

Kennedy's chosen process was ingenious. The entire speech is to his fellow Americans, not to the Soviet Union. He didn't tell the Soviets that they were either with us or against us. He didn't lay down preconditions for negotiations. He didn't make a list of things that the Soviets must do. There were no threats of sanctions. In fact, the opposite was true. The entire speech was about US behavior and US attitudes. Instead of lecturing the Soviets, Kennedy said:

'I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitude - as individuals and as a nation - for our attitude is as essential as theirs." We should, he said, "begin by looking inward," to "the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.'

Brilliantly, Kennedy, then spoke about our own actions as well as our own attitudes. He said:

'We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy - or of a collective death-wish for the world.'

History records the results. Khrushchev immediately declared to Averell Harriman, the U.S. diplomatic envoy, that the speech was "the best statement made by any president since Roosevelt," and declared his intention to negotiate a treaty. So successful was Kennedy and his team, led by speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who is with us this evening, that the speech itself was followed in a mere six weeks by a Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, initialed on July 25, 1963. That Test Ban Treaty, history shows, was the turning point of the Cold War, the first step down from the threat of imminent mutual destruction that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a step that put the world on the path of arms control, then détente, Perestroika, and the end of the Cold War itself. Cooperation had begotten cooperation, in the shadow of the near-Armageddon in Cuba.

Threats of self-fulfilling conflict will rise in the years ahead. Many Americans and Europeans, though still protected by the dominant military forces on the planet, will be afraid, and increasingly so. They will fear the rise of China's economic, political and military power, the rise of India, the changing demographics of the Middle East and of our own societies. The US will not be "the world's sole superpower," and perhaps never really was. We can't even secure Baghdad, much less the world. And we will likely be eclipsed in total economic size by China within a generation, though not in per capita income. Western Europe's population, which was nearly four times that of the Middle East plus North Africa in 1950, is now only one-third larger, and will be at parity by 2025. By mid-century, the population of the Middle East and North Africa will be around one-third larger than Europe's population. In the meantime, the Muslim population in Europe will also soar, perhaps to around one-third in the major cities, both because of in-migration and because of higher fertility rates of European Muslims compared with European Christians.

This will all be cause for alarm in many quarters and we already see it in the rise of anti-immigrant politics today. Yet we must not let our anxieties run ahead of us, and thereby lose control of our future. Fear begets fear, but so too can trust beget trust. It's all in the process. I speak tonight in a city that is an exemplar of what globalization can offer. New York City is about 40 percent foreign born. It is a unique amalgam of civilizations. Manhattan is a quarter Hispanic, 15 percent African American, 10 percent Asian, and half white, non-Hispanic. It is a forerunner of the demographics of the U.S. as a whole by mid-century, when the white, non-Hispanic population will be a mere 50 percent, down from 70 percent today. London, in the same way, is a forerunner of Europe's changing demography. Yet New York and London are not cities in disarray, but just the opposite. They are arguably the two quintessential World Cities at the start of the 21st Century. They are both hugely prosperous, hugely safe, and hugely diverse.

I was in London during the subway bombings in July 2005. What impressed me above all else was the calm appeal by all U.K. leaders for mutual respect and for attention to the shared fate of the country's various ethnic communities, Christian and Muslim alike. This maturity reflected the traditions and wisdom of hundreds of years of open society, tolerance, and democratic self rule. This attitude is the way to peace. And the U.K. as well as the U.S. will be safer still the sooner all of our troops, American and British, are out of Iraq.

Continued immigration, across cultural and economic divides, is not only inevitable but also broadly beneficial. Immigrants deepen the ties that hold our world together. Today's migrants don't abandon their homelands, but bridge their homelands with their adopted countries. They make links, economic, cultural, and social. Immigration needs to be steady and sure, neither a floodgate nor a trickle. A floodgate would disrupt the long-term processes of social trust and institution building in the host and source countries. A trickle would allow a build-up of global pressures and illegal population movements to an intolerable degree.

Of course, we would be wise to ease such pressures a bit by helping the poorest countries to achieve a voluntary reduction of the high fertility rates in places where population growth is still extraordinarily high. There is no question that the demographic bulge in the today's impoverished countries, including the poorest regions of Africa and the Middle East, adds to tensions but also undermines economic development and wellbeing in those countries. In some of the poorest regions, fertility rates are still so high that populations are doubling every generation. This adds to poverty, youth unemployment, despair, violence among young people, and mass migration as well. Scientific evidence shows squarely that even the poor would like to have fewer children, and will chose to do so, when they can gain access to family planning and contraception, and when they are confident that their children will survive, get an education, and have the chance to participate as productive members of the global society. Once again, though the Bush Administration speaks of fighting terror and instability, it undermines those very goals by slashing public spending on programs of voluntary fertility reduction in the world's poorest countries.

In summary, if we proceed with wisdom, our global generation can cooperate. It is, most likely, in our very genes. We must see peace as a process. We must understand too the fragility of peace, and how war can escalate. We have much too much these days of threats, sanctions, and preemptive strikes, and far too little of examining our own attitudes as Kennedy bade us to do. It's time for a process of building trust, with Iran, with Palestine, with Africa, and with our own poor. Each of us needs to reach out, in our multiple identities, to make connections to other parts of the world. As a social scientist and policy analyst, it is my great joy and pleasure to work with colleagues in Egypt, Ethiopia, Malaysia, India, China, and Iran. The miracles of video conferencing allow me to give lectures and to exchange views with Iranian, Palestinian, Malaysian, and Chinese students.

We need to end pre-conditions to talk. We need to end the prevailing confusion that claims that negotiating with an adversary is the same as appeasing that adversary. The true lesson of the 1938 Munich Agreement, when British Prime Minister Chamberlain acceded to Hitler's assault on Czechoslovakia, is not to end future negotiations with adversaries, but to reject concessions that cripple one's security. We will find that dialogue may well open vast vistas of cooperation. Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and other countries truly need to find solutions for energy, water supplies, food production, and adaptation to climate change. We can help, and we should do so. And by converting some of our bloated military budget into practical efforts to fight malaria, AIDS, climate change, unsafe water, and unwanted fertility, we would even more strengthen the bonds of cooperation. Let us take at least $70 billion of the $623 billion military budget and program it as practical help to the poorest countries. And let's save another $100 billion per year by ending the Iraq War itself.

I return, once again, to John Kennedy's deepest insight, the one that he gained and shared with the world after peering into the nuclear abyss in October 1962. This insight explains why we can cooperate, and why we will. As he said:

'For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.'

Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much indeed. Now it's for our audience here at Columbia University in New York to explore and challenge those propositions, as they apply most particularly to the United States. So let's begin then, and I'm going to go first of all to Harvey Molotch, who is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Professor?

PROF. HARVEY MOLOTCH: You've told us about John Kennedy, and you've told us about our genes. What is it about American traditions and the deeper currents of those traditions that you can identify that will lead to this kind of self-examination, openness to the rest of the world as well as to the country itself? How do you spot those and what do you think they are?

JEFFREY SACHS: One thing I think we can say about the American people is that they are pragmatic. We see that while Americans largely supported the Iraq war, as patently misguided as it was, before the war ever commenced, Americans now see it doesn't work. And I think that pragmatism is certainly our best hope. Our country has produced great leaders in an open society that is still very open, and we've produced leaders who spoke of charity for all, and malice towards none, and who said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and who told us to look inward to make peace with our enemy. So we've produced such great leadership in the past. We need it today. That will help.

SUE LAWLEY: Professor Molotch, do you want to come back?

PROF. HARVEY MOLOTCH: Yes. Given that the ease with which things can go so off-kilter, it makes me uncomfortable to think that it depends on particular leaders coming along at particular times. And so what can we fall back on in terms of either our heritage or the institutional structure of the country that would imply that we're going to get through this kind of impasse and create such a different mode of thinking about ourselves?

JEFFREY SACHS: We learned after September 11 how incredibly fragile our institutions are. We learned how they can be hi-jacked by fear and by misguided leadership. We did not see the bulwark of our institutions holding up. If the Iraq war had been a rousing success we would have been on to more wars in the region, I have little doubt about it. That was the game plan. What can we do about it beyond hope? We can talk to each other, do what we're doing now, alert each other that we are not past the risk right now. We still face real risks of self-fulfilling danger, because we are still with a mindset that is prone to a vulgarism of us versus them, a readiness to attack and bomb people whose names we can't name, whose places we don't know and couldn't even locate on a map.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to call in Jason Weingartner here. He's Chairman of the Young Republicans in New York State. I think we need to hear this voice.

JEFFREY SACHS: We probably don't fully agree.

(LAUGHTER)

JASON WEINGARTNER: What, we're pre-judging already? (LAUGHTER) Well America has great democratic institutions, and a proud history of, especially after World War Two, of domestic protection and promotion of those democratic institutions - the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act - and internationally after the Cold War with our promotion of democracy abroad. Aren't you underestimating the United States' record in that regard?

JEFFREY SACHS: We do believe in the expansion of democracy, and I believe that there are also very deep reasons in the world why that's happening. I just don't believe that you bring that about by bombs. And when you do have a democratic election, like we've had in Palestine, I believe you talk with the government. So I think that if we're really serious about doing these things we should fulfill our side of the bargain in a more systematic way, which is to discuss with democratically elected governments, even when we don't like what they say.

SUE LAWLEY: People on the front row here itching to come back to you. Your point?

HAYLEY PANZER: Hello, my name's Hayley Panzer. How do you reconcile your feelings about the Iraq war with two major polls recently out which show that the majority of Iraqis feel their lives are better than they were under Saddam, and they do not wish the US to leave soon?

JEFFREY SACHS: Well you read different polls than I do.

HAYLEY PANZER: That's your answer?

JEFFREY SACHS: That's my answer.

HAYLEY PANZER: All right.

JEFFREY SACHS: It's, it's just not at all in accord with…

HAYLEY PANZER: One of them was 'USA Today'. I forget the other, I'm not sure ...

JEFFREY SACHS: There is such overwhelming unhappiness, and so many lost lives, so much destruction and so much danger that has arisen from this, that there is no way that I think that any of this can be justified. That's my answer.

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to bring in Rick Brownell, who writes history books for high school children I'm told.

RICK BROWNELL: That's correct.

SUE LAWLEY: So your question?

RICK BROWNELL: Thank you. Professor, you were recently in China. It's a nation clearly on the rise on the world stage. To what extent should the United States be concerned about the rise of China, and what can we do diplomatically and economically to counterbalance them?

JEFFREY SACHS: I think the rise of China is a fundamental part of global history right now. History shows in the twentieth century that leading powers and rising powers don't have an easy time of it, and that's exactly the 1914 story, although the exact trigger of the war remains somewhat obscure. But it was clearly an arms race between a rising Germany and a naval leader, the British Empire, that stood as the fundamental fulcrum around which the alliances that finally triggered World War I were oriented. This could happen again. How China evolves will depend, just like John Kennedy says, on our own attitudes and our own form of behaviour. There is nothing fundamental about a conflictual relationship with China, but there is nothing that guarantees that we won't get trapped in one. It will depend heavily on how we behave ourselves, and our own attitudes.

SUE LAWLEY: Mr Brownell, do you want a quick comment on that?

RICK BROWNELL: Er yeah.

SUE LAWLEY: Do you buy that?

RICK BROWNELL: I tend to think…

SUE LAWLEY: A quick one, a quick one.

RICK BROWNELL: …though that China does a little bit of pushing of its own, like the way it's treated Tibet, its policy regarding Taiwan, most recently the test firing of, shooting down a satellite. I mean these are clearly steps that they're deliberately making to say to the world we're here, and no offence but I think that they, you know, are actually acting in an imperialistic fashion.

SUE LAWLEY: There you go, but you get into your them and us, and we, we can't get into a debate about China specifically now. I'm going to move on, Jeffrey, if you don't mind. What about a comment from here?

ELIZA KRETZMANN: My name is Eliza Kretzmann and I'm a student here at Columbia University, and I also have a question related to the shift in international power, as this shift is expected to occur from the US to places like just China and India. The United Nations also predicts that over two million people will migrate to the US and Europe every year from now until 2050. My question is, if the East is going to be home to the new superpowers, why do you think so many people will continue to migrate west?

SUE LAWLEY: It is a contradiction.

JEFFREY SACHS: A lot of the migration is not coming from India and China, but it's coming from Africa, North Africa and the Middle East into Europe, and Latin America's our biggest source of migration in the United States. So there's a powerful economic force, because there's a very big economic gap still remaining between the US in technological and per capita terms. It's the same thing with Europe vis-a-vis the Middle East and Africa. The world is still highly unequal on income distribution, and those inequalities of per capita income and productivity will lead to persisting pressures on migration for quite a long time to come.

SUE LAWLEY: I'd like to get a few quick comments in from the floor. Can you make a quick comment, and I'll just take a couple.

DAVID UNGER: Right. David Unger from our home town newspaper…

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes.

DAVID UNGER: …editorial page. (LAUGHTER) I don't want to be the, the voice of pessimism and doom here but I think in order to do what you outlined, which is certainly crucial to our wellbeing, we have to understand the magnitude of the task before us. And I think that we kid ourselves if we think we're just talking about the last six years. We've been through a lot of history, through Vietnam, through the Iran hostages, through 9/11, through the collapse of the Soviet empire, and it seems to have made us and our political system, our identity as a nation, somehow want to secede from accountability to the international community and the rules of other nations, whether it takes the form of an aggressive unilateralism, or a wounded self-righteous retreat from the world after Vietnam or after Iraq. This seems to be what our political system resonates to.

SUE LAWLEY: Jeff, I could ask you to address it as swiftly as you can?

JEFFREY SACHS: One thing that I find in the world right now, in speaking with dozens of world leaders, is a readiness to work on some of the hard challenges that I talked about - climate, water, population, extreme poverty. Indeed there's a certain measure of seriousness in countries in all parts of the world that is rather striking right now. It's fear in a way but fear grounded in a sense of the real dangers that are at a global scale. I believe that even reasonable leadership in this country will give an opportunity to reduce the fear tremendously. I do think September 11 was an extraordinary event, clearly without being banal about it. It opened up the possibilities for much worse than we could have imagined, much worse about us. It led to an end of introspection for several years, to bellicosity, to faith in the military approach, to the idea that we could bludgeon them all - after all we are the world's sole superpower. America has learned that that's a failure, but we have not yet gotten to the next stage, of understanding the nature of that failure.

SUE LAWLEY: Just here?

MATTHEW D'ANCONA: Matthew D'Ancona of 'The Spectator'. Professor, you spoke often and eloquently about leadership and choice and agency. You also quoted frequently from Kennedy's June 1963 address. Can I then adapt for a globalised and interconnected era an earlier speech of his, in January 1961, and say to you, 'Ask not what the world can do for you, ask what you can do for the world'. Is it not time that you cut out the middle man and ran for the presidency of the United States of America?

(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)

JEFFREY SACHS: I have some of my neighbours here and I, they tell me I'm not sure I can carry 85th Street on the Upper West Side (LAUGHTER) so there's a little bit of a problem between your, your hopes and… (MATTHEW LAUGHS) So er…

SUE LAWLEY: So the Sachs for President bandwagon is not going to get under way.

JEFFREY SACHS: We haven't noticed the bandwagon, neither the band nor the wagon.

(LAUGHTER

SUE LAWLEY: I'm going to take a question from the gentleman here.

MAN: ... this has been interfaith work and peace work around the world, and I share your, kind of this enlightenment, rational model, your language, reason and spirit, kind of universal shared values. The problem is that the world isn't behaving in a rational model of self-interest, in fact we're seeing people blow up their own environments instead of working in collaboration. What's the solution there?

JEFFREY SACHS: The issue here is not religious strife that is out of control and boiling over. It's controllable. It's a matter of politics, it's a matter of management, it's a matter of understanding, it's a matter of institutions, it's a matter of how we behave. We have to see how there's another way. So these are processes, peace is a process.

SUE LAWLEY: We have, as you mentioned, during the course of your lecture, Jeff, we have Theodore Sorensen - Ted Sorensen - sitting on the front row there, lawyer and writer who was Special Advisor and speechwriter to President Kennedy. I wonder, having heard everything you've heard this evening, sir, whether you'd care to say something?

THEODORE SORENSEN: That's very nice, thank you. It's been an extraordinary experience for me to sit here tonight and listen to such a wise and wonderful lecture, with so many references to a speech given forty-three years ago, and I'm sure if President Kennedy were alive and here tonight he would be moved and touched as I am to think that that speech of his, that basic message of his forty-three years ago is now going out through these BBC lectures all over the world. Since I know a little bit about the speech that you frequently cited, I wonder why…

SUE LAWLEY: Can I just say, did you write it?

THEODORE SORENSEN: Oh I never acknowledge that. President Kennedy was the author of all of his speeches. (LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE) Or I, or what I should say in answer to that question is, 'Ask not'. (LAUGHTER) So my recommendation to you, Jeff, when you make this lecture again, is to cite two other parts of that speech. One is a passage where President Kennedy said, 'The world knows America will not start a war. This generation of Americans has seen enough of war.' Haven't heard that recently! The second was where he not only asked for a re-examination of our relations with the Soviet Union, but praised the Soviet people for the enormous contribution and sacrifice they made in World War Two, which no-one had ever done before, and the Soviets rather resented it, and it was one of the ways that he reached Khrushchev. Seems to me we live in a world where the people of Islam have been rejected and humiliated for generations, and if someone took the time to praise their contributions to civilisation over the centuries, that might help.

(APPLAUSE)

JEFFREY SACHS: Don't you think we have the makings of another speech coming? (LAUGHTER) I think it is so astounding that President Kennedy's and your speech was not only so brilliant that it gives shivers when you read it or listen to it, but it literally worked within weeks. It did exactly what it was meant to do: it changed history. This is an astounding, astounding truth, and it's an astounding accomplishment of, of this man before us tonight. It's just amazing.

(APPLAUSE)