Monday 19 February 2018

USER MANUAL FOR A PLANET

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 10th Jan 2016

"The Age of Sustainable Development" by Jeffrey Sachs
Columbia University Press (2015)
Soft cover, 544 pages


The extreme weather of December 2015, with floods across Northern Britain and lethal tornadoes in Texas, felt like a possible tipping point in the debate over the reality of climate change. Assuming the Democrats win the next US election – and if they don't, all bets are off – then politicians might turn their minds to tackling the looming climate crisis. Then Jeffrey Sachs' sumptuous tome "The Age of Sustainable Development" would be a good thing to keep at their elbow.

Excessive deference by politicians to the opinion of economists is an intellectual pathology of our times: the debacle over Greek debt and default showed us pretty convincingly where the power now lies. This phenomenon is referred to by Left commentators as neo-liberalism – giving priority to market forces over humane, planned policies – and that the Labour Party's Blairite rump has taken to deprecating use of the term suggests it still has some traction. For those who oppose neo-liberal austerity policies the options are limited, since state socialism has failed comprehensively wherever tried and is no longer saleable. Neo-Keynesian policies of various strengths alone retain any political credibility, and so a generation of neo-Keynesian economists, notably Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich, now makes most of the running (somewhat surprisingly from the USA). These economists seek to defend the political against neo-liberal budgetary superstitions, and promote expansionary policies on the reasonable assumption that putting money back into people's pockets stimulates demand and restores a virtuous growth cycle. And then there is Jeffrey Sachs...

Currently Columbia's professor of sustainable development and director of its Earth Institute, Sachs is indeed another Keynesian macroeconomist, but rather different from the other stars of the "Keynesian Resurgence" that followed the 2008 crash. Adviser to the Russian, Polish, Slovenian and Estonian governments during their transition from Communism, he promoted what then amounted to neo-liberal privatisation plans. He's more interested in ameliorating world poverty than in US Democratic Party policy, does work for both the IMF and the United Nations, and has been special adviser to UN Secretaries Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon. Such a CV could tempt one lazily to classify Sachs as a "Right" rather than "Left" Keynesian, but on the evidence of this book that would be short-sighted.

In reviewing "The Age of Sustainable Development" it's hard to resist first remarking its arresting, supra-commercial production standards. Published by Columbia University Press with a foreword by Ban Ki-Moon, it's printed on the finest matte-coated paper with full-colour graphs, maps, diagrams or photographs on over half its 544 pages (and a fiendishly clever metallised photo cover). Such luxury might further stamp Sach's project as "Establishment", but that would again be lazy. He's written a clear, well-organized and non-polemical account of the number and the immensity of challenges that we face, and the sheer inadequacy of current governmental responses to them, aimed at nothing less than a prescription for eliminating world poverty by enabling and encouraging developing nations to catch up with Western standards of health, education and life-chances, in ways compatible with reducing the threat of anthropogenic climate change.

Sachs bases his approach on the science of complex systems, seeking to understand the world as "a complex interaction of economic, social, environmental and political systems”. This leads him continually to cross boundaries between disciplines that normally share neither a common language nor way of thinking, a style that's reminiscent of certain other systems thinkers like Vaclav Smil. This he calls "clinical economics", a discipline intended to advise and encourage "governments, experts and civil society to undertake the 'differential diagnoses' necessary to overcome remaining obstacles". Many such differential diagnoses inform both this book and the UN's Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), of which Sachs was chief strategist. The key word is "differential", as his method involves separately analysing each country, even region, to take account of its history, ethnic culture, religion, ideology and other factors that have altered the course of its development. He claims that failure to perform such differential analysis is what causes so much foreign aid to be wasted, and so many humanitarian endeavours to produce perverse results (the invasion of Iraq springs to mind).

The argument is unfolded in a highly-structured manner, first refining the big goal of sustainable development into three subgoals, economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, then further subdividing and expanded these over 14 fact-crammed chapters. There's far too much detail to even attempt a summary here, and the excellent maps, graphs and diagrams are crucial to following the argument. As an example Chapter 3, "A Brief History Of Economic Development" is a succinct, multi-causal account of the rise of Western capitalism, viewed from cultural, religious, political and geographic dimensions. Chapter 4 "Why Some Countries Developed While Others Stayed Poor" outlines the obstacles to development, which include:

~ the "poverty trap": countries too poor to make basic investments

~ mistaken economic policy

~ financially insolvent governments

~ physical geography: far from trade routes because landlocked or in high mountains

~ bad governance

~ cultural barriers like the subjugation of women

~ geopolitics: wars with neighbours or colonising powers

The other twelve chapters cover the whole gamut of environmental challenge, from poverty, over-population, loss of habitat and species extinction, to overextraction of resources, disrupted nutrient cycles, urbanization, social mobility, climate change and, most importantly, the way all these problems interact, feed back and amplify one another. Sustainable development is “inherently an exercise in problem solving" and Sachs is a techno-optimist who believes that it's possible, in theory, to retain some economic progress of a reformed, sustainable kind that will allow the developing world to catch up. His optimism is neither blind nor irrational, based in part on the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev's theory of "waves" of technological advance that drive the world economy: from steam engines, railways and steel, through electrification, chemicals and automobiles, to the digital revolution. Sachs believes the next wave will be a "sustainability revolution" based on nanotechnology, smarter agriculture, renewable energy sources and huge efficiency gains made possible by new, cheap digital control systems.

Sachs embraces nuclear power in addition to renewable energy sources, and believes it possible that the poorest countries can catch up, assuming sacrifices by affluent Western populations that will be real, but perhaps no worse than those about to be inflicted on them by the cupidity of the oligarchic "1%". Swedish population scientist Hans Rosling, in his brilliant documentary "Don't Panic", visualised the way the top octile (by income) of the world's population emits half the carbon dioxide, a proportion that halves again for each succeeding lower octile, which has twofold implications: the very poorest populations have plenty of room to grow themselves out of poverty without disastrously affecting the outcome, but equally, combating global warming becomes overwhelmingly our, Western, responsibility. Similar calculations about inequality suggest that we top 10% also need to shrug off neo-liberal policies before we start berating the poorest nations for corruption. Both Sachs and Rosling have noticed, unlike more radical alarmists, that developing-world fertility is already falling so steeply that population growth will level out this century.

To ask whether Sachs is of the Left, Right or Centre is moot, since all his prescriptions demand deep collaboration between a strong civil society and a strong, honest, state. He's a Bernsteinian social democrat in effect, if not in name: "Even when the financing is strictly within the private sector, a proper regulatory framework and corrective measures are very important to make sure that the private sector is investing in the right areas and is driven by market signals that are giving accurate indicators of overall social costs and social benefits." He's not a pious liberal interventionist who seeks to impose democracy by decree: development in the absence of democracy (as in China) is still a goal, with some hope it may lead to democracy later. Nor is he a utopian, being acutely aware of the many obstacles to achieving these goals.

And the obstacles are almost insurmountably severe: oligarchic vested interests; climate-change-denying US Republicans; Islamists who obstruct the emancipation of women (and the reduced fertility it brings); anti-state libertarians, like those Silicon Valley billionaires who think it more fun to colonise Mars than save this planet; neo-nationalists and racists who degrade our political discourse; and the reluctance of Western populations to sacrifice any comfort. Sachs also retains too much, possibly misplaced, faith in the integrity of international banks and UN aid institutions. What's worse, the degradation of politics is now proceeding at such a pace that even a book published in 2015 looks out-of-date regarding the perils: Sachs devotes little space to the Middle East, with neither Syria nor Iraq appearing in the index, and the current refugee crisis was barely starting when he wrote it.

Even so, and dauntingly dense though it is, reading this book will leave you as well-informed as anyone about the scale of our problems and their possible solutions, if not about the politics needed to achieve them. The beautifully-designed volume is indispensable for anyone who believes, however timidly, that sanity might one day prevail. It's a user manual for running a planet sustainably, the trouble being that a manual is seldom what people reach for first when smoke and flames start coming out of the box....



No comments:

Post a Comment

PEACEFUL CIVIL WAR?

Dick Pountain /Political Quarterly/ 03 May 2023 09:42 BOOK REVIEW: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf; Allen Lane Feb 2023,...