Jeffrey D. Sachs's Blog, page 43

Sustainable Development Economics

PARIS – Two schools of thought tend to dominate today’s economic debates. According to free-market economists, governments should cut taxes, reduce regulations, reform labor laws, and then get out of the way to let consumers consume and producers create jobs. According to Keynesian economics, governments should boost total demand through quantitative easing and fiscal stimulus. [...]

China’s New Global Leadership

NEW YORK – The biggest economic news of the year came almost without notice: China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy, according to the scorekeepers at the International Monetary Fund. And, while China’s geopolitical status is rising rapidly, alongside its economic might, the US continues to squander its global leadership, owing [...]

The climate breakthrough in Beijing gives the world a fighting chance

Today’s US-China joint announcement on climate change and energy is the most important advance on the climate change agenda in many years. While the full ramifications will only be known at the climate summit in Paris in December 2015, the two largest C02 emitters have finally spoken, and most importantly, they’ve spoken together. What they’ve [...]

Can We Break The American Plutocracy?

Understanding and Overcoming America’s Plutocracy

Pity the American people for imagining that they have just elected the new Congress. In a formal way, they of course have. The public did vote. But in a substantive way, it’s not true that they have chosen their government. This was the billionaires’ election, billionaires of both parties. And while the Republican and Democratic [...]

A New Macroeconomic Strategy

I am a macroeconomist, but I dissent from the profession’s two leading camps in the United States: the neo-Keynesians, who focus on boosting aggregate demand, and the supply-siders, who focus on cutting taxes. Both schools have tried and failed to overcome the high-income economies’ persistently weak performance in recent years. It is time for a [...]

We don’t need an Ebola czar

There is no case for an American Ebola czar, least of all another political “fixer” who has no expertise in public health. This is just another case of the Obama administration putting politics before substance, and cowering at the idiocy and vileness of the Republicans in Congress. We already have an enormously competent national Ebola [...]

France 24: The Interview

Watch here. Jeffrey D. Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also an economist and a special advisor to the UN Secretary-General Ban K-moon. Five years ago, in Copenhagen, member states failed to sign an agreement on limiting climate change. Jeffrey Sachs tells Marc Perelman that the UN Climate [...]

Global Handwashing Day in the Time of Ebola

We shouldn’t require a horrific epidemic like Ebola to remind us why we observe Global Handwashing Day today. But it seems, alas, many in the world can use a reminder about the importance of good hygiene. Though proper hygiene – including the use of soap and water to stop the transmission of infections – has [...]

On CNN: Ebola is a controllable epidemic