The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs

Half a century ago J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society changed the political consciousness of a generation in the English- speaking world and beyond. It vividly re-established in the minds of civilised men and women the paradox of private affluence in a sea of public neediness — for which, as Matthew Arnold reminds us, Cato reported by Sallust had a name in his description of ancient Rome: ‘publice egestas, privatim opulentia’ (public poverty, private opulence).

From this premise he made the case for the mixed economy, one in which the genius and power of market forces is balanced and harnessed by effective government in promoting public goods and correcting market failures — including gross inequality — that mar unconstrained laissez-faire. This was the consensus that held sway — until, from about 1980, the Reaganite notion that ‘government is the problem’ began to displace it, at least in the US.

Jeffrey Sachs’s new book is a landmark in this great and essentially American tradition, setting out with luminous clarity the narrative and the analysis of how the US and the wider world has been traduced and seduced by debased ideology, racist reflexes and huge vested interests from its liberal and enlightened roots. Indeed, Sachs by his life and his writing goes far to restore one’s wavering faith in the informing inspiration of the post-1945 new dawn, faith in economics, faith in America and faith in humanity.

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In plain and accessible English this scion of all that is best about New England’s academia — scholarly, original, independent, rigorous, enlightened and enlightening — starts from the belief that economics is a moral enquiry with the task of helping most people to lead happier lives by reducing poverty. That, as the great Alfred Marshall observed, makes economics ‘the study of the causes of the degradation of a large part of mankind’.