I heard Sachs being interviewed in the latest Nature Podcast.
Oliver Morton: I think one of the striking things, Jeff that you say very early on in [your new book, 'Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet'] is that the great crisis point is that we have a unified global economy and a divided global society and well as the big question is how can we use the first of those things to fix the second?
Jeffrey Sachs: I think the key is better understanding of the unique situation we find ourselves in. The world is now so crowded. The extent of resource use is so remarkable and unprecedented that we are putting pressures on the physical environment and on each other in ways that have never occurred before at this scale. Of course, the point of the book is to say if we don't understand the mechanisms of what we are doing and then address them, the consequences will be dire, at the same time, the very technological prowess that allows us to have the 70 trillion dollar world economy also allows us to find correctives to the problems that we are creating and so I believe that there is a way out that is not dire. This is not an end of the world book, it's only a warning that we have to change course.
Oliver Morton: It is noticeable that in the period from I suppose the early 1980s onwards, research and development in both agriculture and some of them, I think will come onto energy stagnated quite dramatically. Why do you think that was and do you think we will have a realistic chance now of turning that around.
Jeffrey Sachs: I think that there is stagnation in two senses. One is the overall levels of funding tended to go down, but perhaps even more pertinently funding of government fell precipitously, so the public sector funding went down. Why is this? Well there were temporal issues like the temporary decline of oil prices; it seems like a long time ago, but in the 1980s and early 1990s oil prices were low. People said, "Let's go back to fossil fuels" and they forgot all about the overall global need to develop alternative energy resources, so that was very short sighted. There also was a very mistaken privatization of science that took place in these applied areas, where it was said, let the private sector do it, let private sector run ahead on agro-biotechnology, let the private sector invest in energy, we don't really need government to do it, and this is a huge mistake.
P.S. Sb's own PZ Myers is also interviewed in the same podcast on the inner workings of the cephalopod eye.
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Interesting. I like this Sachs guy. I'm reading his other book "The End of Poverty". It's a little heavy on the I'm-going-to prove-once-and-for-all-that-free-market-economics-will-save-the-world, however it's really well-written, easy to read and a good way to learn the basics of the economics that run the world. And you can't help but think that maybe he's right.
It's interesting he mentions the energy issue - because from what I've read, the imminent depletion non-renewable resources is the one fatal flaw of his plan to save the world through unrestricted economic development.