"If the World Cooperates…" Jeffrey Sachs' Esoteric Doctrine of Impending Doom

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If we continue on our current course – leaving fate to the markets, and leaving governments to compete with each other over scarce oil and food – global growth will slow under the pressures of resource constraints. But if the world cooperates on the research, development, demonstration, and diffusion of resource-saving technologies and renewable energy sources, we will be able to continue to achieve rapid economic progress. [emphasis added]

A good place to start would be the climate-change negotiations, now underway. The rich world should commit to financing a massive program of technology development – renewable energy, fuel-efficient cars, and green buildings – and to a program of technology transfer to developing countries.

Almost every Sachs book and op-ed contains something like this, which seems to me to amount to little more than hopeful exhortation. The cynical view is that Sachs is involved mostly in signaling. It’s worked well for him so far. But I think he really cares. So a somewhat less cynical view is that Sachs is a grim pessimist who sees catastrophic market failure everywhere and sees immensely improbable global collective action as the only possible solution. Because he is always so incredibly vague about the institutional mechanisms that would be needed to solve the assurance problems necessary to get this kind of enormous cooperative effort off the ground, we ought to infer that Sachs doesn’t know what those mechanisms are, and so he probably suspects that global cooperation at the necessary scale is impossible. That is Sachs’ esoteric doctrine: We are probably doomed. But Sachs, strangely for an economist, also believes strongly in the power of propaganda, especially the power of elevating rhetoric from high-status figures, to transform social norms. It’s a longshot that Bono and Angelina can really bring about a fundamental transformation of public sentiment in a way that makes the global coordination problem tractable, but since it’s the only hope we’ve got, exhortation must continue.

If Sachs straightforwardly said what he really thinks, people would panic, which would be bad. So he really is doing us all a favor.

6 thoughts on “"If the World Cooperates…" Jeffrey Sachs' Esoteric Doctrine of Impending Doom”

  1. Pingback: “If the World Cooperates…” Jeffrey Sachs’ Esoteric Doctrine of Impending Doom · Buwin Technology

  2. Sachs is right. All animals run economies with no planning. We figured out planning works that's why we rule. That's why they are living in holes they dig in the ground and we live in Skyscrapers in New York or McMasions in the burbs 30 miles from our place of work. That's why they eat millet seeds and we eat sushi. That's why they need big teeth and we only need a well planned constitution and the rule of law. We plan they don't. The computer chips and the Internet used to make this communication possible basically results from planning and then were adapted for market use. They were NOT the results of markets alone.

    Free markets are for all the other animals ruled by the contingencies of nature why do some insist on returning to us o the rules of nature.

  3. Sorry to feed the troll, but I will continue to do so until the troll does his homework and reads the article that has been assigned to him, repeatedly:

    In ordinary language we describe by the word “planning” the complex of interrelated decisions about the allocation of our available resources. All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.
    H.5

    The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.
    H.6

    Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. And this, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.

  4. This is great. If there is one efficient way to solve problems it is to leave them up to the government. Even better, however, is to leave things up to a broad coalition of governments with a loose definition of responsibility. That's why the United Nations has eradicated world hunger and prevented all wars since 1945.

    Sarcastic, obviously.

    The world would be over before anyone even agreed on who should foot the bill.

  5. This is great. If there is one efficient way to solve problems it is to leave them up to the government. Even better, however, is to leave things up to a broad coalition of governments with a loose definition of responsibility. That's why the United Nations has eradicated world hunger and prevented all wars since 1945.

    Sarcastic, obviously.

    The world would be over before anyone even agreed on who should foot the bill.

  6. Pingback: cooperative research