Jeffrey D. Sachs: America’s New Progressive Era?

NEW YORK – In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan came to office famously declaring that, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Thirty-two years and four presidents later, Barack Obama’s recent inaugural address, with its ringing endorsement of a larger role for government in addressing America’s – and the world’s – most urgent challenges, looks like it may bring down the curtain on that era.

 Reagan’s statement in 1981 was extraordinary. It signaled that America’s new president was less interested in using government to solve society’s problems than he was in cutting taxes, mainly for the benefit of the wealthy. More important, his presidency began a “revolution” from the political right – against the poor, the environment, and science and technology – that lasted for three decades, its tenets upheld, more or less, by all who followed him: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and, in some respects, by Obama in his first term.

The “Reagan Revolution” had four main components: tax cuts for the rich; spending cuts on education, infrastructure, energy, climate change, and job training; massive growth in the defense budget; and economic deregulation, including privatization of core government functions, like operating military bases and prisons. Billed as a “free-market” revolution, because it promised to reduce the role of government, in practice it was the beginning of an assault on the middle class and the poor by wealthy special interests.

These special interests included Wall Street, Big Oil, the big health insurers, and arms manufacturers. They demanded tax cuts, and got them; they demanded a rollback of environmental protection, and got it; they demanded, and received, the right to attack unions; and they demanded lucrative government contracts, even for paramilitary operations, and got those, too.

For more than three decades, no one really challenged the consequences of turning political power over to the highest bidders. In the meantime, America went from being a middle-class society to one increasingly divided between rich and poor. CEOs who were once paid around 30 times what their average workers earned now make around 230 times that amount. Once a world leader in the fight against environmental degradation, America was the last major economy to acknowledge the reality of climate change. Financial deregulation enriched Wall Street, but ended up creating a global economic crisis through fraud, excessive risk-taking, incompetence, and insider dealing.

Maybe, just maybe, Obama’s recent address marks not only the end of this destructive agenda, but also the start of a new era. Indeed, he devoted almost the entire speech to the positive role of government in providing education, fighting climate change, rebuilding infrastructure, taking care of the poor and disabled, and generally investing in the future. It was the first inaugural address of its kind since Reagan turned America away from government in 1981.

If Obama’s speech turns out to mark the start of a new era of progressive politics in America, it would fit a pattern explored by one of America’s great historians, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who documented roughly 30-year intervals between periods of what he called “private interest” and “public purpose.”

In the late 1800’s, America had its Gilded Age, with the creation of large new industries by the era’s “robber barons” accompanied by massive inequality and corruption. The subsequent Progressive Era was followed by a temporary return to plutocracy in the 1920’s.
Then came the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and another 30 years of progressive politics, from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. The 1970’s were a transition period to the Age of Reagan – 30 years of conservative politics led by powerful corporate interests.
It is certainly time for a rebirth of public purpose and government leadership in the US to fight climate change, help the poor, promote sustainable technologies, and modernize America’s infrastructure. If America realizes these bold steps through purposeful public policies, as Obama outlined, the innovative science, new technology, and powerful demonstration effects that result will benefit countries around the world.

It is certainly too early to declare a new Progressive Era in America. Vested interests remain powerful, certainly in Congress – and even within the White House. These wealthy groups and individuals gave billions of dollars to the candidates in the recent election campaign, and they expect their contributions to yield benefits. Moreover, 30 years of tax cutting has left the US government without the financial resources needed to carry out effective programs in key areas such as the transition to low-carbon energy.

Still, Obama has wisely thrown down the gauntlet, calling for a new era of government activism. He is right to do so, because many of today’s crucial challenges – saving the planet from our own excesses; ensuring that technological advances benefit all members of society; and building the new infrastructure that we need nationally and globally for a sustainable future – demand collective solutions.

Implementation of public policy is just as important to good governance as the vision that underlies it. So the next task is to design wise, innovative, and cost-effective programs to address these challenges. Unfortunately, when it comes to bold and innovative programs to meet critical human needs, America is out of practice. It is time to begin anew, and Obama’s full-throated defense of a progressive vision points the US in the right direction.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. His books include The End of Poverty and Common Wealth.

Jeffrey D. Sachs: The Lost Generations

NEW YORK – A country’s economic success depends on the education, skills, and health of its population. When its young people are healthy and well educated, they can find gainful employment, achieve dignity, and succeed in adjusting to the fluctuations of the global labor market. Businesses invest more, knowing that their workers will be productive. Yet many societies around the world do not meet the challenge of ensuring basic health and a decent education for each generation of children.

Why is the challenge of education unmet in so many countries? Some are simply too poor to provide decent schools. Parents themselves may lack adequate education, leaving them unable to help their own children beyond the first year or two of school, so that illiteracy and innumeracy are transmitted from one generation to the next. The situation is most difficult in large families (say, six or seven children), because parents invest little in the health, nutrition, and education of each child.

Yet rich countries also fail. The United States, for example, cruelly allows its poorest children to suffer. Poor people live in poor neighborhoods with poor schools. Parents are often unemployed, ill, divorced, or even incarcerated. Children become trapped in a persistent generational cycle of poverty, despite the society’s general affluence. Too often, children growing up in poverty end up as poor adults.

A remarkable new documentary film, The House I Live In, shows that America’s story is even sadder and crueler than that, owing to disastrous policies. Starting around 40 years ago, America’s politicians declared a “war on drugs,” ostensibly to fight the use of addictive drugs like cocaine. As the film clearly shows, however, the war on drugs became a war on the poor, especially on poor minority groups.

In fact, the war on drugs led to mass incarceration of poor, minority young men. The US now imprisons around 2.3 million people at any time, a substantial number of whom are poor people who are arrested for selling drugs to support their own addiction. As a result, the US has ended up with the world’s highest incarceration rate – a shocking 743 people per 100,000!

The film depicts a nightmarish world in which poverty in one generation is passed on to the next, with the cruel, costly, and inefficient “war on drugs” facilitating the process. Poor people, often African-Americans, cannot find jobs or have returned from military service without skills or employment contacts. They fall into poverty and turn to drugs.

Instead of receiving social and medical assistance, they are arrested and turned into felons. From that point on, they are in and out of the prison system, and have little chance of ever getting a legal job that enables them to escape poverty. Their children grow up without a parent at home – and without hope and support. The children of drug users often become drug users themselves; they, too, frequently end up in jail or suffer violence or early death.
What is crazy about this is that the US has missed the obvious point – and has missed it for 40 years. To break the cycle of poverty, a country needs to invest in its children’s future, not in the imprisonment of 2.3 million people a year, many for non-violent crimes that are symptoms of poverty.

Many politicians are eager accomplices to this lunacy. They play to the fears of the middle class, especially middle-class fear of minority groups, to perpetuate this misdirection of social efforts and government spending.

The general point is this: Governments have a unique role to play to ensure that all young members of a generation – poor children as well as rich ones – have a chance. A poor kid is unlikely to break free of his or her parents’ poverty without strong and effective government programs that support high-quality education, health care, and decent nutrition.
This is the genius of “social democracy,” the philosophy pioneered in Scandinavia, but also deployed in many developing countries, such as Costa Rica. The idea is simple and powerful: All people deserve a chance, and society needs to help everybody to secure that chance. Most important, families need help to raise healthy, well-nourished, and educated children. Social investments are large, financed by high taxes, which rich people actually pay, rather than evade.

This is the basic method to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. A poor child in Sweden has benefits from the start. The child’s parents have guaranteed maternity/paternity leave to help them nurture the infant. The government then provides high-quality day care, enabling the mother – knowing that the child is in a safe environment – to return to work. The government ensures that all children have a place in preschool, so that they are ready for formal schooling by the age of six. And health care is universal, so the child can grow up healthy.

A comparison of the US and Sweden is therefore revealing. Using comparable data and definitions provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US has a poverty rate of 17.3%, roughly twice Sweden’s poverty rate of 8.4%. And America’s incarceration rate is 10 times Sweden’s rate of 70 people per 100,000. The US is richer on average than Sweden, but the income gap between America’s richest and poorest is vastly wider than it is in Sweden, and the US treats its poor punitively, rather than supportively.
One of the shocking realities in recent years is that America now has almost the lowest degree of social mobility of the high-income countries. Children born poor are likely to remain poor; children born into affluence are likely to be affluent adults.
This inter-generational tracking amounts to a profound waste of human talents. America will pay the price in the long term unless it changes course. Investing in its children and young people provides the very highest return that any society can earn, in both economic and human terms.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the United Nations Millennium Project from 2002 to 2006, is a professor at Columbia University, Director of its Earth Institute, and a special adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. His books include The End of Poverty and Common Wealth.

Jeffrey D. Sachs: Finding the Keys to National Prosperity

NEW YORK – In many of history’s most successful economic reforms, clever countries have learned from the policy successes of others, adapting them to local conditions. In the long history of economic development, eighteenth-century Britain learned from Holland; early nineteenth-century Prussia learned from Britain and France; mid-nineteenth-century Meiji Japan learned from Germany; post-World War II Europe learned from the United States; and Deng Xiaoping’s China learned from Japan.

Through a process of institutional borrowing and creative adaptation, successful economic institutions and cutting-edge technologies spread around the world, and thereby boost global growth. Today, too, there are some great opportunities for this kind of “policy arbitrage,” if more countries would only take the time to learn from other countries’ successes.

For example, while many countries are facing a jobs crisis, one part of the capitalist world is doing just fine: northern Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Germany’s unemployment rate this past summer was around 5.5%, and its youth unemployment rate was around 8% – remarkably low compared with many other high-income economies.

How do northern Europeans do it? All of them use active labor market policies, including flex time, school-to-work apprenticeships (especially Germany), and extensive job training and matching. 

Likewise, in an age of chronic budget crises, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland run near-balanced budgets. All three rely on budget rules that call for cyclically adjusted budget balance. And all three take a basic precaution to keep their entitlement spending under control: a retirement age of at least 65. This keeps costs much lower than in France, and Greece, for example, where the retirement age is 60 or below, and where pension outlays are soaring as a result.

In an age of rising health-care costs, most high-income countries – Canada, the European Union’s Western economies, and Japan – manage to keep their total health-care costs below 12% of GDP, with excellent health outcomes, while the US spends nearly 18% of GDP, yet with decidedly mediocre health outcomes. And, America’s is the only for-profit health system of the entire bunch. A new report by the US Institute of Medicine has found that America’s for-profit system squanders around $750 billion, or 5% of GDP, on waste, fraud, duplication, and bureaucracy.     

In an age of soaring oil costs, a few countries have made a real difference in energy efficiency. The OECD countries, on average, use 160 kilograms of oil-equivalent energy for every $1,000 of GDP (measured at purchasing power parity). But, in energy-efficient Switzerland, energy use is just 100 kg per $1,000 of GDP, and in Demark it is just 110 kg, compared with 190 kg in the US.

In an age of climate change, several countries are demonstrating how to move to a low-carbon economy. On average, the rich countries emit 2.3 kg of CO2 for every kg of oil-equivalent unit of energy. But France emits just 1.4 kg, owing to its enormous success in deploying safe, low-cost nuclear energy.

Sweden, with its hydropower, is even lower, at 0.9 kg. And, while Germany is abandoning domestic production of nuclear energy for political reasons, we can bet that it will nonetheless continue to import electricity from France’s nuclear plants.

In an age of intense technological competition, countries that combine public and private research and development (R&D) financing are outpacing the rest. The US continues to excel, with huge recent breakthroughs in Mars exploration and genomics, though it is now imperiling that excellence through budget cuts. Meanwhile, Sweden and South Korea are now excelling economically on the basis of R&D spending of around 3.5% of GDP, while Israel’s R&D outlays stand at a remarkable 4.7% of GDP.

In an age of rising inequality, at least some countries have narrowed their wealth and income gaps. Brazil is the recent pacesetter, markedly expanding public education and systematically attacking remaining pockets of poverty through targeted transfer programs. As a result, income inequality in Brazil is declining.

And, in an age of pervasive anxiety, Bhutan is asking deep questions about the meaning and nature of happiness itself. In search of a more balanced society that combines economic prosperity, social cohesion, and environmental sustainability, Bhutan famously pursues Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. Many other countries – including the United Kingdom – are now following Bhutan’s lead in surveying their citizenry about life satisfaction.

The countries highest on the ladder of life satisfaction are Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Yet there is hope for those at lower latitudes as well. Tropical Costa Rica also ranks near the top of the happiness league. What we can say is that all of the happiest countries emphasize equality, solidarity, democratic accountability, environmental sustainability, and strong public institutions.

So here is one model economy: German labor-market policies, Swedish pensions, French low-carbon energy, Canadian health care, Swiss energy efficiency, American scientific curiosity, Brazilian anti-poverty programs, and Costa Rican tropical happiness.

Of course, back in the real world, most countries will not achieve such bliss anytime soon. But, by opening our eyes to policy successes abroad, we would surely speed the path to national improvement in countries around the world.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University, Director of its Earth Institute, and a special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. His work focuses on economic development and international aid, was he was Director of the UN Millennium Project from 2002 to 2006. His books include The End of Poverty and Common Wealth.

Jeffrey D. Sachs: A World Bank for a New World

NEW YORK – The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion, and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability, and environmental ruin.

The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they imply. The global stakes are thus very high this spring as the Bank’s 187 member countries choose a new president to succeed Robert Zoellick, whose term ends in July.
The World Bank was established in 1944 to promote economic development, and virtually every country is now a member. Its central mission is to reduce global poverty and ensure that global development is environmentally sound and socially inclusive. Achieving these goals would not only improve the lives of billions of people, but would also forestall violent conflicts that are stoked by poverty, famine, and struggles over scarce resources.

American officials have traditionally viewed the World Bank as an extension of United States foreign policy and commercial interests. With the Bank just two blocks away from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, it has been all too easy for the US to dominate the institution. Now many members, including Brazil, China, India, and several African countries, are raising their voices in support of more collegial leadership and an improved strategy that works for all.

From the Bank’s establishment until today, the unwritten rule has been that the US government simply designates each new president: all 11 have been Americans, and not a single one has been an expert in economic development, the Bank’s core responsibility, or had a career in fighting poverty or promoting environmental sustainability. Instead, the US has selected Wall Street bankers and politicians, presumably to ensure that the Bank’s policies are suitably friendly to US commercial and political interests.

Yet the policy is backfiring on the US and badly hurting the world. Because of a long-standing lack of strategic expertise at the top, the Bank has lacked a clear direction. Many projects have catered to US corporate interests rather than to sustainable development. The Bank has cut a lot of ribbons on development projects, but has solved far too few global problems.

For too long, the Bank’s leadership has imposed US concepts that are often utterly inappropriate for the poorest countries and their poorest people. For example, the Bank completely fumbled the exploding pandemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria during the 1990’s, failing to get help to where it was needed to curb these outbreaks and save millions of lives.

Even worse, the Bank advocated user fees and “cost recovery” for health services, thereby putting life-saving health care beyond the reach of the poorest of the poor – precisely those most in need of it. In 2000, at the Durban AIDS Summit, I recommended a new “Global Fund” to fight these diseases, precisely on the grounds that the World Bank was not doing its job. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria emerged, and has since saved millions of lives, with malaria deaths in Africa alone falling by at least 30%.

The Bank similarly missed crucial opportunities to support smallholder subsistence farmers and to promote integrated rural development more generally in impoverished rural communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For around 20 years, roughly from 1985 to 2005, the Bank resisted the well-proven use of targeted support for small landholders to enable impoverished subsistence farmers to improve yields and break out of poverty. More recently, the Bank has increased its support for smallholders, but there is still far more that it can and should do.

The Bank’s staff is highly professional, and would accomplish much more if freed from the dominance of narrow US interests and viewpoints. The Bank has the potential to be a catalyst of progress in key areas that will shape the world’s future. Its priorities should include agricultural productivity; mobilization of information technologies for sustainable development; deployment of low-carbon energy systems; and quality education for all, with greater reliance on new forms of communication to reach hundreds of millions of under-served students.

The Bank’s activities currently touch on all of these areas, but it fails to lead effectively on any of them. Despite the excellence of its staff, the Bank has not been strategic or agile enough to be an effective agent of change. Getting the Bank’s role right will be hard work, requiring expertise at the top.

Most importantly, the Bank’s new president should have first-hand professional experience regarding the range of pressing development challenges. The world should not accept the status quo. A World Bank leader who once again comes from Wall Street or from US politics would be a heavy blow for a planet in need of creative solutions to complex development challenges. The Bank needs an accomplished professional who is ready to tackle the great challenges of sustainable development from day one. 

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

Jeffrey D. Sachs: Sustainable Humanity / 可持續人道精神

ADDIS ABABA – Sustainable development means achieving economic growth that is widely shared and that protects the earth’s vital resources. Our current global economy, however, is not sustainable, with more than one billion people left behind by economic progress and the earth’s environment suffering terrible damage from human activity. Sustainable development requires mobilizing new technologies that are guided by shared social values.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has rightly declared sustainable development to be at the top of the global agenda. We have entered a dangerous period in which a huge and growing population, combined with rapid economic growth, now threatens to have a catastrophic impact on the earth’s climate, biodiversity, and fresh-water supplies. Scientists call this new period the Anthropocene – in which human beings have become the main causes of the earth’s physical and biological changes.

The Secretary-General’s Global Sustainability Panel has issued a new report that outlines a framework for sustainable development. The GSP rightly notes that sustainable development has three pillars: ending extreme poverty; ensuring that prosperity is shared by all, including women, youth, and minorities; and protecting the natural environment. These can be termed the economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainable development, or, more simply, the “triple bottom line” of sustainable development.

The GSP has called for world leaders to adopt a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, that will help to shape global policies and actions after the 2015 target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Whereas the MDGs focus on reducing extreme poverty, the SDGs will focus on all three pillars of sustainable development: ending extreme poverty, sharing the benefits of economic development for all of society, and protecting the Earth.

It is, of course, one thing to set SDGs and quite another to achieve them. The problem can be seen by looking at one key challenge: climate change. Today, there are seven billion people on the planet, and each one, on average, is responsible for the release each year of a bit more than four tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This CO2 is emitted when we burn coal, oil, and gas to produce electricity, drive our cars, or heat our homes. All told, humans emit roughly 30 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, enough to change the climate sharply within a few decades.

By 2050, there will most likely be more than nine billion people. If these people are richer than people today (and therefore using more energy per person), total emissions worldwide could double or even triple. This is the great dilemma: we need to emit less CO2, but we are on a global path to emit much more.

We should care about that scenario, because remaining on a path of rising global emissions is almost certain to cause havoc and suffering for billions of people as they are hit by a torrent of droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and more. We have already experienced the onset of this misery in recent years, with a spate of devastating famines, floods, and other climate-related disasters.

So, how can the world’s people – especially its poor people – benefit from more electricity and more access to modern transportation, but in a way that saves the planet rather than destroys it? The truth is that we can’t – unless we improve dramatically the technologies that we use.
We need to use energy far more wisely while shifting from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. Such decisive improvements are certainly possible and economically realistic.

Consider the energy inefficiency of an automobile, for example. We currently move around 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of machinery to transport only one or just a few people, each weighing perhaps 75 kilograms (165 lbs.). And we do so using an internal combustion engine that utilizes only a small part of the energy released by burning the gasoline. Most of the energy is lost as waste heat.

We could therefore achieve huge reductions in CO2 emissions by converting to small, lightweight, battery-powered vehicles running on highly efficient electric motors and charged by a low-carbon energy source such as solar power. Even better, by shifting to electric vehicles, we would be able to use cutting-edge information technology to make them smart – even smart enough to drive themselves using advanced data-processing and positioning systems.

The benefits of information and communications technologies can be found in every area of human activity: better farming using GPS and micro-dosing of fertilizers; precision manufacturing; buildings that know how to economize on energy use; and, of course, the transformative, distance-erasing power of the Internet. Mobile broadband is already connecting even the most distant villages in rural Africa and India, thereby cutting down significantly on the need for travel.

Banking is now done by phone, and so, too, is a growing range of medical diagnostics. Electronic books are beamed directly to handheld devices, without the need for bookshops, travel, and the pulp and paper of physical books. Education is increasingly online as well, and will soon enable students everywhere to receive first-rate instruction at almost a zero “marginal” cost for enrolling another student.

Yet getting from here to sustainable development will not just be a matter of technology. It will also be a matter of market incentives, government regulations, and public support for research and development. But, even more fundamental than policies and governance will be the challenge of values. We must understand our shared fate, and embrace sustainable development as a common commitment to decency for all human beings, today and in the future.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

 

Jeffrey D. Sachs: 可持續人道精神

亞的斯亞貝巴——可持續發展的意思是實現人人得益的經濟增長，同時又保護地球的寶貴資源。但是，當前的全球經濟是不可持續的，10億以上的人口沒有趕上經濟進步進程，地球環境也因人類活動而受到了可怕的傷害。可持續發展要求動員受共同價值指導的新技術。

聯合國秘書長潘基文正確地指出，可持續發展是全球日程的重中之重。我們已經進入了一個危險的時期，人口數量龐大且在不斷增長，經濟增長十分迅速，因而對地球氣候、生物多樣性和清潔水供給造成了災難性影響。科學家將這一新時期稱為“人類紀”（Anthropocene），即人類稱為地球物質和生物變化的主要原因的時期。

潘基文的全球可持續發展委員會（Global Sustainability Panel，GSP）發布了一份新報告，列出了一個可持續發展框架。GSP正確地指出，可持續發展有三大支柱：終結極端貧困、保証繁榮為所有地球人所共享（包括婦女、年輕人和少數民族），以及保護自然環境。它們分別可以稱為可持續發展的經濟、社會和環境支柱，或統稱為“三條基線”。

GSP呼吁世界領導人採用新的可持續發展目標（Sustainable Development Goal），簡稱SDG，從而在千年發展目標（Millennium Development Goals，MDG）於2015年到期后制定新的全球政策。MDG專注於削減極端貧困，而SDG將專注於可持續發展的三大支柱：終結極端貧困、讓全社會分享到經濟發展的好處，以及保護地球。

當然，設置SDG是一回事，實現它們又是另一回事。其中的問題可以從一大關鍵挑戰中一窺端倪：氣候變化。如今，地球人口已經突破了70億，平均而言，每個人每年要向大氣排放4噸二氧化碳。這些二氧化碳產生於我們燃燒煤、石油和汽油來生產電力、發動汽車或室內取暖的過程中。總的來說，人類每年要向大氣層排放300億噸二氧化碳，足以在短短幾十年間讓氣候發生急劇變化。

到2050年，地球人口極有可能將突破90億。如果那時的地球人比今天更富有（因而人均能源使用量也更多），那麼世界總排放量將可能增長一倍甚至兩倍。這就造成了一個兩難困境：我們需要減少二氧化碳的排放，但腳下的路卻通向更多的排放。

我們必須認真對待這一情景，因為沿著增加全球排放之路走下去幾乎肯定造成一場大浩劫，數十億人口將因干旱、熱浪、颶風等災難遭受苦難。近幾年來，我們已經在經歷這一浩劫的起始階段，飢荒、洪水和其他與氣候有關的災難輪番不斷地襲擊著地球。

那麼，世界人民——特別是貧困人口——如何從更多的電力和更現代的交通中獲益，同時又實現對地球的拯救而不是破壞呢？答案是我們無法做到這一點，除非我們能夠極大地改良我們所使用的技術。

我們需要更加精明地使用能源，同時從化石燃料轉向低碳能源。在這方面的決定性改良是可實現的，而且具有經濟上的現實性。

比如，我們可以考慮一下汽車能效問題。目前，我們正在使用1 000到2 000公斤的機器運送一個或數個人，每個人的重量大約為75公斤。汽車所使用的內燃機隻能利用汽油燃燒所釋放的能量的一小部分。大部分能量以廢熱的形式浪費掉了。

因此，我們可以使用又小又輕、以電池作為能源的汽車，採用高效的電動馬達，使用太陽能等低碳能源。更妙的是，使用電動汽車，我們可以用高精尖信息技術使它們智能化，甚至通過高級數據處理技術和定位系統實現自動駕駛。

信息和通信技術所帶來的好處可以在人類活動的所有領域看到：GPS和滴灌技術所帶來的農業進步、精密制造、能自動實現節約能源的建筑，更不用說消除距離隔閡的互聯網了。移動寬帶已能將最偏遠的非洲和印度農村互聯起來，從而大大降低差旅需要。

如今，銀行業務也可以通過電話實現，越來越多的醫療診斷也是如此。電子書出現在各式各樣的手持設備中，你不再需要跑到書店去，制作圖書也不再需要用紙漿。教育也越來越在線化了，很快，各地的學生就能以幾乎為零的（增加學生人數的）“邊際成本”獲得一流的教學服務。

但從現階段邁向可持續發展光靠技術是不行的。市場激勵、政府監管以及對研發的公共支持也是必不可少的。但是，比政策和治理更基本的問題是價值挑戰。我們必須理解我們的共同命運，以悲天憫人的胸懷將可持續發展作為共同承諾，讓今天和明天變得更好。

Jeffrey D. Sachs是哥倫比亞大學經濟學教授，地球研究所主任，也是聯合國秘書長千年發展目標特別顧問。