Jeffrey Sachs Quotes

“History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.”

“The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.”

“The rich control our politics to a huge extent. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.”

“They did not understand that by liberalizing imports, the government was also promoting exports.”

“We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.”

“Disparities and high costs fuel the health care crisis. America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one.

The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling.

The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large.

The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world.”

“Four very powerful corporate lobbies have repeatedly come out on top and turned our democracy into what might more accurately be called a corporatocracy.”

“Here is my recommendation for President Trump and the new Congress. Turn immediately to our glorious national institutions, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for a report to the nation on the key areas for science and technology investments in the coming generation.

Ask them to recommend an organizational strategy for a science-based scaling up of national and global R&D efforts. Call on America’s research universities to add their own brainstorming to the work of the national academies.

Later in 2017, the president and Congress should then meet in a joint session of Congress to set forth a new technology vision for the nation and an R&D strategy to achieve it.”

“Is there a way forward, when campaign financing and mega-lobbying have displaced the common good and have led Americans to despair about the functioning of the political system?

Since incumbent politicians won’t vote for campaign reform on their own, are we doomed to a vicious circle of big money, big corruption, failing public services, and a collapse of democratic rule?”

“Over the course of nearly a half-century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by U.S. strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire.”

“With higher saving and investment rates, both public and private, directed towards productive capital, the United States could overcome secular stagnation.”

“If we continue doing things as usual, we will end up suffering a social and ecological crisis with catastrophic consequences.”

“There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.”

“Too many of us think 'peace' is impossible. Too many of us think it's unreal. But this is a dangerous and defeatist opinion. It leads us to think that war is inevitable.”

“We must focus on the starting point: offering the world's poorest goods as obvious as vaccines, antibiotics, food supplements, improved seed varieties, fertilizers, roads, drilling, pipelines, textbooks. and the nurses.

This does not mean turning the poor into beings dependent on gifts; is to give them the inputs that compensate for their efforts to improve their standard of living.”

“We will never achieve the objective of economic convergence because this work would be frustrated by an environmental catastrophe. Many environmentalists claim that we are condemned to consequently reduce economic growth.”

“Measures like GDP per person give only a rough reflection of the overall level of wellbeing of an individual or a nation. But for sustainable development we are interested in raising human wellbeing, not just in raising income, still less in a mad race for more riches for people who are already rich.

Therefore, it is important to ask how we can best measure wellbeing (or life satisfaction) beyond GDP per capita.”

“We have entered a new era. Global society is interconnected as never before. I suggest that we have arrived in the Age of Sustainable Development.”

“A combination of investments in tune with local needs and conditions can allow African economies to escape the poverty trap.”

“Deep down, if we really accept that their lives – African lives – are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. It's an uncomfortable truth.”

“In rural societies, large families are almost always the norm. In urban societies, families choose to have fewer children.

This is the crux of the demographic transition, one of the most fundamental of all social changes during the era of modern economic growth.”

“Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.”

“Poor health causes poverty and poverty contributes to worse health.”

“Reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them.”

“Sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty.”

“The current situation is a bit like the joke that workers in the former Soviet Union used to make: We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us!”

“The rich world dominates the training of Ph.D. economists, and the students of rich-world Ph.D. programs dominate the international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have the lead in advising poor countries on how to break out of poverty.”

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority – whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional – rather than an accident of timing or geography.”

“The world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss.”

“A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure.

In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is 'conspicuous consumption', that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.”