Jeffrey D. Sachs's Blog, page 30

The truth about trade

The debate over global trade and investment has played a central role throughout the 2016 campaign, as it did in the 1992 election. Back then, third-party candidate Ross Perot claimed that the proposed North American Free Trade Act with Canada and Mexico would cause a “giant sucking sound” of jobs out of the United States [...]

Why government can’t negotiate with big pharma

Smart machines and the future of jobs

SINCE THE EARLY 1800s, several waves of technological change have transformed how we work and live. Each new technological marvel — the steam engine, railroad, ocean steamship, telegraph, harvester, automobile, radio, airplane, TV, computer, satellite, mobile phone, and now the Internet — has changed our home lives, communities, workplaces, schools, and leisure time. For two centuries [...]

Facing up to income inequality

The census bureau recently announced a heartening 5 percent gain in the median household income between 2014 and 2015, the largest one-year gain on record. Yet a look at the longer-term trends offers a sobering perspective. The jump in household income merely helps to make up for lost ground; the median earnings in 2015 were [...]

SDG Advocates Introduction at Global Citizen Festival 2016

From the CIA to the GFE

NEW YORK – The United States needs to shift its spending from war to education, from CIA-backed regime change to a new Global Fund for Education (GFE). With hundreds of millions of children around the world not in school, or in schools with under-qualified teachers, a lack of computers, large class sizes, and no electricity, [...]

On the importance of the Global Citizen Festival, and the SDGs

Jeff Sachs and fellow SDG Advocates at the 2016 Global Citizen Concert

Sustainable infrastructure after the Automobile Age

THE BREAKTHROUGH AMERICAN infrastructure of the early 19th century was the Erie Canal, which connected the Midwest farm belt with the Port of New York and the eastern seaboard. In the second half of the 19th century, the railroad offered the next infrastructure revolution by connecting the two oceans and the continent in between. In the [...]

INTERVIEW – World leaders must show us the money to hit goals on poverty, inequality – UN adviser

ONDON, Sept 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – World leaders need to ramp up investment to achieve a set of global goals agreed a year ago to combat poverty, inequality, and make the world a safer place by 2030, according to a key adviser on the United Nation’s blueprint for the future. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia [...]