Jeffrey Sachs im Gespräch

Jeffrey Sachs ist einer der bekanntesten und auch kritischsten US-amerikanischen Ökonomen. Sein Name steht für nachhaltige Entwicklung. Er ist Direktor des Earth Institutes und Professor für nachhaltige Entwicklung, sowie Gesundheitspolitik und -management an der Columbia Universität in New York.

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Jeffrey Sachs is one of the best-known and most critical American economists. His name stands for sustainable development. He is director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development, as well as health policy and management at Columbia University in New York.

Transcript of the interview below

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 00:00

Professor Jeffrey David Sachs, I highly treasure that you followed my invitation, came to the radio house in Vienna, in Argentinierstrasse, to make this conversation possible with me about you, your theories, your ideas, your life. Welcome.

Jeffrey Sachs 00:17

Thank you. And I'm most grateful for the invitation. Happy to be here.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 00:21

Thank you so much, Professor Sachs. We are, as it seems, living in times of fundamental transformation. Can you draw the picture from where we transform to where, and what are, in your opinion, the negative and the positive sides of this transformation? Because transformation is something that we always did as mankind.

Jeffrey Sachs 00:44

Maybe I could start by quoting a guru of mine who passed away last year, Professor Edward Wilson, who was a great evolutionary biologist at Harvard, and a wonderful teacher of mine and a wonderful friend. And he had a saying, which I really love. He said, "So we have stumbled into the 21st century with our stone age emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology." And what is key about that insight is that we have massive change, but we have underlying systems that operate at very different speeds. Our primordial human nature, our institutions, and cultures, which are hundreds or even 1000s of years old, and technology, which just zooms ahead, often in very dangerous ways. And we need to master this. And what makes it all the more difficult is we need to master it at a global scale. And we're not very good even at talking with each other across societies and cultures. But the challenges that we face cannot be handled by any society alone, much less any single country alone.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 02:01

Can you explain to us maybe from your own experience, why people are always afraid when transformation starts, and we can feel it? And we don't feel safe anymore? So how did it start for you? How did you feel that something is going on?

Jeffrey Sachs 02:16

I think we haven't been safe since the start of the nuclear age, in a way, which is something really different. One of my favorite quotations of an American leader, President Kennedy, in his inaugural address is a very pithy and wise statement that he made, he said: "For the World is very different now. Mankind holds in his mortal hands, the ability to end all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life."

And I think that is the existential reality that we have lived in, really, since the 1950s, which is that because of this incredible acceleration of technology, we can do remarkable things, we can talk about ending poverty, which has been a big theme of my life and career. But we also know that we really could end all forms of human life. And when Kennedy said it in January 20, 1961, he was speaking of the one way that we could end all life, which was nuclear war. But now we know we could end a lot of life or certainly a lot of well being with environmental destruction as well. So that's yet another shadow that hangs over us. But I think it's true that if you're not worried and anxious, your eyes aren't open right now.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 03:50

But does it mean that we are not in a new transformation? Does it mean that we are in the process that started 1950, and what got worse or goes to the wrong direction more rapidly?

Jeffrey Sachs 04:05

I think basically, yes, we're in long term change. I often put the date strangely enough, back in 1776, which is a very interesting year. It's a year that some people know because the American Revolution, it's the year that my tribe–economists–know because it's the publication of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. But it's also probably most importantly, the year in which James Watt commercialized his steam engine. And to my mind that changed everything, more than probably any invention beforehand. Arguably, the printing press or the compass or agriculture, of course, were huge transformations, but the steam engine, just to explain briefly, made the industrial age. The industrial age changed everything about global society, global power, global geopolitics, the ability to kill each other on an industrial scale. And then, of course, with all of the advances, the rise of modern atomic science, and then the nuclear age with the creation of the atomic bomb in the summer of 1945.

From that point on, life changed dramatically, in all ways, because we really were on a precipice and have remained on the precipice since then. There's a publication in the United States called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has the so-called doomsday clock, the minutes to midnight, and the atomic scientists who know a lot about these risks, have said that we are minutes to midnight and have said so for decades. And I think that that's right. But they've moved the hand closer and closer to midnight, especially in recent years. And I think that that is also correct.

It's stunning for me that we are approaching the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was October 1962. I remember it very vividly, I was about eight years old. I remember to this moment, standing outside, I think it was my second grade room, in primary school, saying to a friend as airplanes were going overhead that maybe they're coming to bomb us. That was 60 years ago. And yet yesterday, I read a statement by a senior Ukrainian military official who said, yeah, there might be tactical nuclear war, Russians might use it, but it won't deter us or change our direction, or stop our ultimate victory. And I just thought, this is just about the stupidest thing that I have read and heard in a long time. But we have been at the precipice, we don't understand it. We keep flirting with the edge.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 07:12

Now we have this dilemma, which is like letting things go because we are fatalists, or we would say that's how life goes, you know, you can’t stop what is started, or to intervene, and to intervene is something I know you were brought up as a Jewish person, but I would say it's something very Protestant. Yeah, we can form the world. So how do you get this dilemma between intervene and going into action to avoid this going over the edge? And letting go?

Jeffrey Sachs 07:44

Well, you know, I can't imagine the letting go. And I think it's pretty deep human nature to try to survive and want to survive. But I would say it is, for me, you know, to the extent since I've ever had any intellectual awareness or self-awareness, it was inculcated into me very, very deeply, from the first moment of my consciousness, do something good. Try to do something good. You mentioned I was born to Judaism and Jewish culture. And one idea of Judaism is called to Tikkun Alum, which is to heal the world. It's about the first thing I heard as a child. It was part of what I was told by my grandfather and by my parents, and it stuck with me as a basic idea: you try to heal the world. Why not? What else are we going to do?

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 08:45

Professor Sachs, are we as man and woman kind, I would say, are we ready to face this transformation in a productive and also peaceful way? Let me ask you the other way around? Did we develop enough tools to face this crisis?

Jeffrey Sachs 09:02

We have the tools. I'm a believer, I guess also, my other pillar of existence intellectually, no doubt is the Enlightenment. And the idea is, we have at least a rational capacity, and knowledge can save us. And as I've grown up, I've understood that those ideas really are not Enlightenment ideas as much as ideas going back at least to ancient Greece. And I'd become a great fan and devotee of Aristotle in my later years.

The basic point: do we have the tools to save ourselves and to do good? Well, we could start at the technological level. No doubt, I could speak as an economist and address a basic question: are there enough resources? Is there enough nature? Is there enough atmosphere and so forth for the 8 billion people on the planet today, to live a decent life? And that's where I've spent most of my professional life, is answering that question. And my answer is, yes. We don't have to live in suffering or poverty. Technologically, we could solve the problems, we can end poverty, we can have decent lives for people.

Then do we have the emotional and the human nature tools to do this? And there, I think the Great Western idea that goes back to Plato and Aristotle and to Jesus and to Augustine and to lots of others, is that human nature has two sides to it. And we are capable incredibly of messing up. And we're capable incredibly of doing good, even heroic good. And that's a positive idea. Those who say we are innately compassionate are a little naive. Those who say we are fallen and innately evil, I don't agree with. I'm on the side that we're both and that the whole idea of this is to understand and choose better, and that that is feasible, and it operates on many levels, human, political, technical, and all of those are important parts of the choices we need to make.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 11:23

We have to face another problem that is the problem of moral truth. Do we still have moral truth? When you said that we have to do the good, so one can ask: what is the good? What are the measures for us, the criterias, philosophical and practical and sociological criterias to say, this is good. In your life, you reflected that when you intervened in economies, for example, we will come to that point later, you had to decide to use measures, some people said they were good. Some other said they were bad. So how do we know what is good and bad? It sounds such a naive question. But I think it's a very, very, very important question in our times today. And it always used to be.

Jeffrey Sachs 12:05

Well, it's not a naive question. It's a fundamental question. And it is exactly the question I asked myself, and I know it, when and how, when I was 17, what is a good society? And now basically, a half century later, I've spent my life trying to understand that question, especially from a material or economic point of view, because I'm an economist, and practice economics, but from a human point of view, more generally. And by the way, it's exactly the question that Socrates' and Plato's dialogues asked. It's the question that Plato asked in the Republic; it's the question that Aristotle asked in the Nicomachean Ethics and in the Politics; and I think Aristotle gave a pretty pragmatic, good answer to it. And that is that a good life is one that has adequate material conditions so that you can live without hunger, without material threat, without deprivation. That's why I've been against poverty and been fighting poverty, all my life.

But it is also living with friends, we should remember that in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle has a chapter about friendship. Friendship is part of the human good. And so is political society, Aristotle's famous phrase that we are zoonpolitikon, that we are political animals that we are naturally living in the polis, living in the political community is crucial. And to me, as an economist, that means lots of things. That we have to understand that we should pay taxes, we should have a government that takes care of health care and education and infrastructure and helps protect the environment. And that means living together and taking collective choices together, not just operating in a marketplace.

But I think the main point is that I like Aristotle, because he's really down to earth. So how should our political institutions be organized? How should our economic institutions be organized? How should our geopolitical institutions be organized? And there's another major point: We live in a deeply interconnected world. And so we better have some common idea of what the common good is and what a good society means if we're going to be able to manage in an interconnected world. And for me, probably, the high point of that idea is a remarkable document, 74 years old, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was an attempt to have a world-wide answer to your question, what is the good, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a universal declaration of the human good. It's remarkable because it says you need economic rights. Of course. You need social rights, you need cultural rights, you need political rights, you need civil rights. Of course, it's almost completely forgotten. And I'm trying to help make next year, a year in which this document which will be on its 75th anniversary, better known again to young people, because my god, the idea that there is a global, common good, and a global sense of what a good society is, would really help us to survive.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 15:57

What I could say now, Professor Sachs, most of the people understand these points that to live good means that all the others also live good. But somebody's hindering that, so let's talk about those who hinder.

Jeffrey Sachs 16:11

John Maynard Keynes, the economist, said, we're probably prisoners to ideas more than we realize, and what looks like simply, or crudely, interest is often also bad ideas. So if we go back to this question of the good life, and let's say we agree that there'd be a pretty shared conception of what it means, then you can reflect on what people have said about that in the last 250 years. And I want to focus on the last 250 years, because that's this period of rapid industrial and technological change, which I was saying, completely up-ended, world society, what had been poor, agrarian world society became industrial, on an incredibly uneven basis. It led to European imperialism, because Europe industrialized first; it led to the industrial wars, which were massively killing, and, of course, destructive; to an industrial Holocaust, and so on.

I think the ideas are important to take on. One idea, which developed in Britain at the end of the 18th century, was the idea that the good life is best achieved through private property and a market economy. That's Adam Smith, of course, and that became liberalism. And liberalism had some positive sides. But it had a very, very dark, negative side to it. And that is that it actually taught, if people are suffering, it's their own fault, leave them alone. And if you try to intervene, you'll make things worse. So Britain developed an ideology where, when there was famine in Ireland in the 1840s, the official answer was, don't help. And when there was famine in India, in the second half of the 19th century, with the serious droughts from El Ninos, don't do anything, because we were taught that laissez faire was the best policy. So that's an idea.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 18:36

Where does this mercilessness comes from?

Jeffrey Sachs 18:39

This is a concept. And I think it's a moral philosophy. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand it, philosophically. But it's very British in roots. By the way, it's not the only place where this occurred, but since Britain became the dominant power in the world, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it had an incredible effect. But one can trace this idea as a kind of ideology of power, which is good things in the world come from activity, they come from effort, so we should champion effort above all, and when you see people suffering, well, they're not trying hard enough. They haven't used their human labor. They're just a burden on society. And that idea grew up in Britain from Thomas Hobbes onward, and it became a British ideology, and since Britain was the world's empire of the 19th century.

Of course, many other theories came. And Karl Marx's theory was, of course, there is difference of interest and that means there is inevitable struggle. Nietzsche's theory came: don't be compassionate, that just holds back the uber mensch, that just holds back the most powerful. And the worst of all, was the social ideology that emerged after Darwin, which translated a biological reality of evolution into a social concept of struggle for survival. And that ultimately gave rise to Nazi ideology as well. But my point is that these ideas count in how societies are organized, in how power is used. And I was completely trained, for example, in the classical economics mode. You have to push your way out of them because within your society, this is taken as normal. So it took me a long time to understand just how nasty certain parts of American society were. I kind of intuited it, and partly coming from a Jewish upbringing, you're always looking a little bit from the outside, and so you see things, but still, you're trained in your own culture. And you're trained in ideas, which are not very good ideas often. And we've got a lot of bad ideas floating around which block our capacity to cooperate.

One of the interesting ideas, by the way, about the United States, which was inherited from Britain, is the idea that in the US, we called it manifest destiny in the 19th century, but as soon as the British pilgrims, the English pilgrims arrived in the United States, they said, Well, this is a new Jerusalem, and we're on a mission. And we're on a global mission. And it was a kind of evangelical mission to say, we're going to save the world. But it turned into an imperial mission, too.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 21:56

All you said, now brings me to this idea that mainly we are facing if you want, a theological, or even transcendence crisis. Because if we talk now about you said, nasty or mean, or we could also say merciful and merciless. If we talk more about a human being and what a human being needs, we should talk about merciless and merciful. So how do we get more mercy into our societies? And is politics and economy ready to help to bring more mercy in our societies, because this is what it seems to me now.

Jeffrey Sachs 22:34

It's only the last 250 years, that the West has been so dominant. It traces essentially to the industrial period. And the reason that's important for me is that when we think about the rise of China right now, or the rise of India, and so on: this is normal. If you take a longer perspective, this isn't some insidious fact, this is just part of normal change. And that helps me to explain to myself and also to others: stop being so insistent upon western values running the world or upon Western dominance, or the threat of China and so forth. Take a little perspective, perhaps astronomically or historically, and that helps us to center ourselves in a really common humanity and a common fate.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 23:42

Let us talk a little bit about you. You were born in 1954. And you grew up in a high middle class family, I would say, in a suburb of Detroit, a city that was founded in 1701. Le Detroit, the street. Yes, yes. So a place where the French traders, right, yeah, Great lakes, and today, almost 80% of the 700,000 inhabitants of Detroit are African Americans or people of color. At the time of your chldhood in Detroit the city was still functioning industrial city–cars as we know, Ford, GM and Chrysler. Your father was a lawyer of labor questions, and you yourself were a highly gifted child, as we can read everywhere. Can you talk to us about this American Jewish middle class privileged childhood in the late 1950s and the early 1960s and about the values of your family, the values of your friends in school, the values of the society as such?

Jeffrey Sachs 24:52

When I was born 1954, this was the heyday of the post World War II prosperity in the United States, and America led everything, led in technology, innovations, cars with big fins on them. It was a cool place. It was a successful country. And there was in America a sense of unity. America defeated fascism, America was the most prosperous country in the world. And it was the most modern country in the world. And Detroit was a booming city called the arsenal of democracy because it was the auto plants that had been converted to making the airplanes and the tanks and the other vast armaments that really were crucial to the Allied victory in World War II. So it was very proud.

And so when I grew up, I thought America was a great and wonderful and unified country. And my own childhood was in a small suburb of Detroit. My father worked in downtown Detroit. He was a lawyer for the trade unions, a progressive and civil rights leader. And, of course, he taught me just about everything I know about these things from early childhood. The community was was very much a middle class community. And since my father was a professional, I had a very comfortable life. What's important for me, and my own understanding is that my father was born to Jewish immigrants who came from Russia, around 1900. They had extremely hard lives, poverty, Great Depression. And what was the breakthrough? Without question from that poverty that my father grew up in, was education. And so it was the most basic unquestioned, no doubt, issue in my household: education is the key. So get a good education, study hard, go to school, go to university. And I think it's not a bad approach, frankly. But it was at the core of my understanding and the ethos of the community.

But basically, I grew up in a small suburb, which was about 60% Jewish, and I thought, well, most people in the world are Jewish, you know, which is a little strange, but it was a comfortable, quiet community and a wonderful place for feeling secure in an early upbringing. But of course, there were tensions everywhere. I mentioned the Cuban missile crisis when I was around eight. And then, of course, a defining event of the life of America and my life was Kennedy's assassination when I was nine years old. That changed everything in America.

Then in the 1960s, two major crises, you know, impinged on my quiet childhood. One was race, and Detroit had massive and very violent and horrific riots in 1967, which burned down a lot of the inner city of Detroit, led most whites to leave the city. That's why Detroit became overwhelmingly African American, because whites left the city to the suburbs. And that was the beginning of the end of Detroit as a major dynamic city because the crisis went on for decades after that. So I witnessed firsthand decline, which is a kind of shocking thing to see. But the second major crisis was the Vietnam War. And already by 14 or 15, I was out marching against the war. And in high school, I was the anti-war activist, because early on, I got the sense that this isn't right. And race and Vietnam was followed by Nixon and Watergate. It was a pretty steep decline. And it changed a tremendous amount, it broke the sense of security and the sense of honesty, and it was the end of an era that Roosevelt had helped to lead. And in a way, America, in my view, has not faced up to reality since then.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 29:40

You graduated in 1972 and started to study at Harvard University and I was asking myself while I was preparing our conversation, if this decline of Detroit and this decline of trust into the institutions of your country shaped or impressed you so that you choose and decided to study economy.

Jeffrey Sachs 30:03

Well, actually, it wasn't that, it was a wonderful adventure that I had in those years that led to it. My parents wanted my sister and me to see the world. So they took us, which was very unusual in those days, to the Soviet Union in 1974 on vacation. We visited Kyiv, St. Petersburg, which was Leningrad and Moscow. And that was already very puzzling to me and very eye opening. I knew there was a Cold War, I didn't know much about anything about capitalism, socialism, nothing. But in any event, it was intriguing. I was basically in 10th grade and around 15 years old. But it happened that in Moscow in the hotel, I struck up a conversation with a young person from East Berlin, who was in Moscow, and he wanted to practice English, I guess. And so we started talking. And at the end of our conversation in the lobby of the Ukraina hotel in Moscow, we exchanged addresses and those days, you didn't have email, we became pen pals. And so every week, I'd get a letter from him, and I'd write a handwritten letter back. We did that for two years. And then I went to visit him. Dirk Bucshing, a wonderful, lovely person.

And in the summer of 1972, I crossed Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and spent a couple of weeks with him in East Berlin and visiting Potsdam and other places in the East. And I was completely confused. At that point, 17 years old, hearing about socialism, he told me a lot about the evils of American society. Those days, you had to put down a certain number of dollars per day of stay to get some paper script that you could use in tourist shops. And in the tourist shop, there was absolutely nothing that I wanted at all, except there was a shelf of books. And so I spent the rest of the summer with my backpack, reading an Introduction to Historical and Dialectical Materialism in English. It was the English language in the German tourist shop, and my introduction to Marx's thought. And my mind was really spinning by the end of the summer, and I was starting university, and we were sent a list of books to read, for the first week of school for orientation. One of the books was Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter. And Schumpeter, of course, Austrian economist, Finance Minister and then Harvard professor in the 40s and 50s, and a very famous figure, I knew nothing about him. And I read the book and couldn't make heads or tails of it, but said, My God, this is all so fascinating. I have to figure this out. What is this socialism? What is this capitalism? So it was really that summer, that directed me to economics and no regrets. This is 50 years later, and I'm still asking exactly the same questions that I asked 50 years ago, but now I know a little bit more than I did then.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 33:42

But does it mean that you became a socialist?

Jeffrey Sachs 33:45

Let me say, for at least 45 years, I've defined myself as a Social Democrat.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 33:54

Let's talk about the 1990s. I consider these years now, I would say from 1990 to 2000, as the years of the big seduction. Why do I say seduction? Because even people that would consider themselves to be leftists felt that all of a sudden there was so much money, so much things were possible. We had like this money machines on every corner, and we could get money at every moment we wanted. This is why I say it was an age of seduction. And in that time, you had written a plan for Poland and went to Poland in 1989 to reform the country. Now what I'm interested in Professor Sachs is this question. You worked at the time with Minister [Lessig Abasarovic]. These reformers, all their lives they were communists forced or by free will, and all of a sudden they wanted something else. What was the mindset of these people? What did they want and did this rash measures that you decided to apply on Poland were what they wanted?

Jeffrey Sachs 34:59

The overwhelming thing that Poland wanted was an end to the division in Europe, of the Iron Curtain. And what Poland wanted, and what was explained to me repeatedly, which was the phrase of the 1989 revolution was the return to Europe. Poland wanted to be part of Europe, full stop. And when I was asked to write a plan, I was told, write what you think best, Professor Sachs, but the plan is for Poland's return to Europe. And this is extremely important, and almost nobody understands it. Because Polish leaders of the Solidarity movement, of the democratization movement, they did not have a sociological or economic blueprint. They had a basic idea, which was that the division of Europe after 1945 was unjust and detrimental to Poland. And, of course, the same was felt throughout Central Europe. And they wanted that wall to come down. What it meant for me, and this is extremely important, was that Poland was to be a normal European economy.

So people ask me, Well, you were free market, you were trying to create a libertarian society and so on. This is so wrong. It's not even a moment of my concept. My concept was that Poland should be normal. In the normal sense in Europe at that time was mostly social democratic, in fact. So the idea that I was somehow free market liberal is ridiculous. It's absolutely had nothing to do with my beliefs or approach. But then comes the technical issues. You have a collapsed, centrally planned system. The country's government is bankrupt, inflation is spiraling. There are shortages everywhere. It's like being in the emergency room. So what do you do? In that context? That's where my expertise as a finance economist and macro economist comes in. I recommended specific measures to save the patient, to help make the path to normalcy in Europe. Those measures worked, and they were highly effective. Now, interestingly, afterwards, I was sometimes attacked, sometimes praised as a free market economist, but I found that many of my allies, for example, Professor Bosorovic, he's far more free market than I am. But we worked together without even knowing that. And the reason we didn't know it was that in the practical circumstances of the economic emergency room of 1989, it didn't matter what your philosophy was about the endpoint, it mattered what do you do about a financial crisis? What do you do about a budget crisis? What do you do about a debt crisis? What do you do about exchange rates? What do you do about trade? Those are tactical issues of how to address a crisis. But in the end, basically, being part of the European Union, pushes countries into a kind of convergence of strategy. And that happened with Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and so forth. That's the reality. And that's what I believed, from the beginning. Take down the barriers. And these countries which were excluded after World War II will become part of the normal Europe.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 39:01

Just once again, going back to this years 1990s to Europe, when the big change in Europe started in 1988-89, Germany, Austria were really social democrat countries with a very strong social welfare state. And when we look back now, or when we look where we are today, 30 years later, we are in countries that are highly neoliberal, where welfare state, social welfare state get cut down. And of course, people would say, well, this all started with this normalizations of the Eastern European countries. Look at them today. They are highly, highly capitalistic. This has nothing to do anymore with the social democrat Europe in the year of 1989. So what happened?

Jeffrey Sachs 39:47

I think one of the things that happened is US ideology became much more predominant. And US ideology was very disappointing and and very surprising to me. We became, starting with Reagan, which was 1981, really neoliberal in the high political class: cut taxes, take away regulation, and so on. Of course, this was never my philosophy and I politically opposed Reagan. But we've never gotten out of that in the United States till today. Clinton was a neoliberal even though he was a Democrat, George Bush, Jr. On and on and on. We're still in the tax cut mode.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 40:38

And Professor Sachs not only that, they are all war masters.

Jeffrey Sachs 40:43

I've been a critic of the United States for a long time, and it really crystallized for me in the 1990s as well. When I was advising Poland, I made several specific recommendations for cutting debt, for financial help, and so on. The US government, the White House accepted all of my recommendations. But then I was asked by Gorbachev's economic team to try to help there. I made recommendations, the White House said no way. Then I was asked by Yeltsin's economic team for help. I made recommendations. The White House said no way. I said what is going on? In Poland? They did it, stabilization fund, debt relief, and so on. Russia, nothing. Well, of course, this was the beginning of not only the neoliberal ascendancy, but the neoconservative ascendancy. This is important to understand. Alongside neoliberalism is the foreign policy variant, which is the US as the dominant power of a unipolar world: that's neoconservatism. That really came to dominance with the fall of the Soviet Union. And that has been the case until today.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 42:06

What is surprising to me is that at the same time, the United States would always claim that they bring democracy, so they could have brought democracy to Russia, maybe with the allowing the measures you were proposing to them. So what is this game between, we bring democracy when we invade Afghanistan and Syria, and we destroy societies, but nevermind, we bring democracy and there is no democracy, as we know where. What is this game between we bring democracy and destroying trade unions in countries, you know, destroying those who fight for democracy in, let's say, in Latin America or elsewhere?

Jeffrey Sachs 42:46

The US politics, and this is all elite politics, this is very important to understand. But the US high politics has almost no interest in democracy, period. It has interest in US power. The US has military bases in 85 countries around the world. The US wants its military in the Black Sea, in Ukraine with NATO enlargement, in Georgia with NATO enlargement. The US is building alliances in East Asia against China. This is about US power. The US has a history because it's been the hegemonic power since 1950, and it was the hegemonic power in the Americas since 1898, of overthrowing governments that it doesn't like and installing governments that it wants, period, full stop. Don't dwell on the rhetoric of democracy. The US doesn't particularly care as long as the military bases are there.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 43:51

People would tell me, you know if I could choose I would like to live under the Americans instead of under the Russians, beside the fact that I don't want to live under nobody wanting to live my life. But how do they manage to not be interested in democracy, but still make people believe that they represent a democracy system which they don't?

Jeffrey Sachs 44:12

One should understand of course, all geopolitics is a specialized language of elites. And this is a an elite practice, with almost no public role at all. Foreign policy is not led by publics. Leaders are not pressured into war, ever that I've seen. Leaders can manipulate the public into supporting wars. But geopolitics is a game. It used to be a game of princes and dukes and emperors. Now, it's a game of presidents and prime ministers and so forth. But it's a game, and by game I mean, it's a strategic interaction of a small number of people. And in the United States, I know these people because I went to school with them. I studied with them. The game is American power. That's it. And you use the language that you want. We talk about American values. American values, what are American values? Look at what happens inside the United States, I'm not so keen on American values, because the US has so many unmet social challenges and needs. But what I do know, and there's a recent dataset that shows it, kept by Tufts University, the United States has had more than 100 military interventions since 1990. It is the most militarized country in the entire world. Bar none, not even close. And yet we point our fingers, of course, at Russia, this is obvious. We point our fingers at China, China has not been in one war in the last 40 years. And we say how belligerent it is. The United States is in wars all over the world. But this is a game of rhetoric. It's sometimes not even worth fighting over these words, because they're empty. What is worth fighting over Is the actual circumstances. We need to end the war in Ukraine.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 46:21

So we've talked about this figure, Jeffrey Sachs, who is listened to all over the world. But how come that in your own country, yes, you are a professor at Columbia University, got a lot of awards, you get awarded by those elites, maybe even that you were mentioning now. So how come that you are a very famous person, but still, you're not listened to?

Jeffrey Sachs 46:45

Well, that seems to go with the territory. One of my joys in recent years has been studying Plato's three attempts to advise the government of Syracuse, and he failed miserably three times. Once he was almost sold into slavery. And I can only tell you what an incredible relief it is to know that Plato failed three times. If you're in the same business, that's pure joy. You know, Plato set the standard. So being a failure in advising is not the worst thing in the world. Of course, you want success, but many times you won't be listened to. My aim is to be as accurate and truthful as possible.

Renata Schmidtkunz, ORF 47:32

So let me ask you Professor Sachs. Jeffrey David Sachs, married to Sonia Sachs, who is also important in your life, not only as your wife, crucial mother of your children, but also as the person you're working with. What gives you the power and the strength and I'm talking about physical, spiritual, transcendental, you know, on every level of your personality, to fight this monster of merciless that we are facing now in not only the American government, but a lot of governments all over the world.

Jeffrey Sachs 48:07

I think it comes back to where we started. What else are we going to do? This is what we should be doing. I was really lucky in incredibly inspiring maternal grandfather who just taught me decency, an incredibly inspiring father for whom decency was second nature in incredible wife who makes everything possible. And her father was an absolutely brilliant and inspiring person who had to fight all his life. He was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1915 in Karlovyvary or Carlsbad. He grew up as a German Jew in the new state of Czechoslovakia. He had to escape within a day of his life from the Nazis in 1939, because he was an Anti-Fascist student leader. He got to England and joined the Czech resistance. He was wounded in France as a tank commander. Almost died. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948. In 1966, they escaped like a movie escape in the Adriatic and made their way to Italy, across the Trieste then to Rome, then to the United States and my wife was a child and came to Harvard a few years later, and we met right at the beginning of school. But her father lived to age 100. And in his 90s, he would sit at the street corner in Baltimore, with anti-war signs, sitting in a lawn chair to protest against the US war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Till age 100, he was fighting. And if you had asked him the question, he would say what else? His whole life was fighting for decency. When you're surrounded by people like that when they have made you what you are, what else would you do?

ORF RadioJeffrey D. SachsSustainable Development