Jeffrey Sachs interview: The Price of Civilization

The Occupy camp outside St Paul’s received an eminent visitor last night. The economist Jeffrey Sachs dropped by to meet the London branch of the movement that is ‘changing American debate’. Sachs sees Occupy as an expression of the frustration at inequality and unfairness that is the subject of his latest book, The Price of Civilization.
 
In 260 pages of fluent prose, Sachs describes the cynicism that has overcome what he calls ‘my America’. In a grubby office at the LSE, he tells me: ‘I grew up in the era of John and Robert Kennedy and they brought a lot of purpose to public life and lot of idealism, and I feel that that has been lost. So this is really a book about civic virtue and that sense of public responsibility.’
 
The book is quietly patriotic. Sachs says that it began as an analysis of the 2008 crash and went through three drafts to finish as an account of 30 years of ‘disastrous’ Washington policy, culminating in his ‘growing disappointment with President Obama’s response’ to entrenched economic and social problems.