A review of Jeffrey Sachs’ Reith Lectures on BBC,
His gospel is a familiar message of global cooperation–rich nations delivering money and resources to developing countries–that can defeat poverty in almost no time flat. We need merely to shed our petty rivalries and rearrange our spending priorities. “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,” he predicts. [...]
Top-down, technical solutions–engineered in Washington, New York, Geneva, and Brussels–dominate the Sachs reform agenda. Without a hint of irony, he places the fate of Africa entirely in the hands of white, Western elites. [...]
Here is the utopian temperament, the delusion that reduces evil to economics and idolizes peace at the expense of justice.
