11 - IIASA Conference '07 on Global Development - 14-15 November 2007

Jeffrey Sachs

The World in 2050

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Lecture Summary

Jeffrey Sachs argues that although the current market economy is good at what it does – delivering growth – protecting the world's poorest and “global commons” (oceans, atmosphere, water supplies, and biodiversity) do not get handled. Sachs warns if ecosystems collapse on a wide scale, they will undo economic growth.

The world needs global cooperation and targeted interventions to overcome the challenges it faces. Priorities are shutting off population growth, breaking the poverty trap, decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth, more intensive agriculture, and greening our cities.

Sachs argues against cuts in consumption and a reordering of priorities from the economic to other measures, like well-being. For him the need is not to take from the rich but to give to the poor. The world has ample wealth to solve the problems of poverty, and is generating more all the time. In addition, technologies offer enormously promising solutions.

Speaker Biography

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change. In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007.

Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He has received many honorary degrees, most recently from Whitman College, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Ohio Wesleyan University, Trinity College Dublin, the College of the Atlantic, and Southern Methodist University. Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard.

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Last updated: 03 Apr 2009