I think I owe you a book review

Funny how it takes me a week after finishing a book to get down to writing about it. I hope the extra time to weigh my thoughts outweighs the things I've already forgotten.

A few posts ago I mentioned I'd started Jeffrey Sachs' book: Common Wealth. The book caught my eye for its subtitle, "Economics for a crowded planet" since I've long thought we need a new economics to fix the instabilities that drive the economy to relentless growth or inevitable collapse. Unfortunately, the book failed to deliver on this point; Sachs did not present radical new economic concepts and a bold new theoretical plan to implement that would fix the system. Despite that, I still found the book worthwhile, offering a coherent look at the problems and possibilities presented by our current global reality.

In contrast to my expectations, Sachs is very practical in his approach. He addresses three issues of a global scale: global climate destabilization, the population explosion, and the vast gap between rich and poor (and the resultant unrest); carefully making the case that each of these will be defining challenges of the next 40 years. He further demonstrates through example that these problems are not going to be addressed by countries and companies acting individually; they are tragedies of the commons on a global scale which need global cooperation to address. Fortunately, Sachs asserts, we have numerous examples already of how these problems can be addressed on a smaller scale, just waiting for an infusion of (primarily monetary) support. In fact, at the dawn of this century, the UN adopted the Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) which outline a set of goals against these problems achievable by 2015. Sachs argues that we could stabilize world population, control climate destabilization, and eliminate global poverty by 2050 for the cost of a couple percentage points of the GNP of the wealthy countries. Unfortunately, progress towards the MDGs has been slowed by countries going their own ways or rejecting the value of these goals entirely. (The US being a particularly poor example.)

If you have studied any of these topics in detail within the last ten years, you'll likely not find anything new in this book on that topic; personally, reading the section on environmental destabilization, I was a little bored because it was largely a repetition of the conclusions I have gotten rather familiar with over the last few years study. However, I imagine few of us have that level of insight into all of these issues - though I think maybe we should.

I particularly gleaned a lot from the section addressing the population explosion. The case for stabilizing or at least significantly slowing our growth is something I was already convinced of. (If you're nor I suggest watching the video I posted about two posts ago.) However, I hadn't connected the dots to realize that the (tested and validated) means to achieve this goal are reducing disease, women's education, and reproductive education. Reducing disease and reproductive education lower the death rate, reducing the motivation for large families, women's education boosts the effect by allowing women to enter into the economy and also hold a larger influence in the home. I used think "family planning" efforts were just vehicles for promoting abortion, but I think that view was at least partially misinformed. Now that I understand a bit more of the goals that prompted this effort (ie. reducing poverty, resource conservation), I have much more respect for the role they play. (To be clear, I still think we should view abortion as the extinguishing of a human life, unacceptable except in the most dire circumstances.)

Anyway, I've probably rambled long enough. I'd recommend the book to anyone with an interest in learning more about global policy and the issues we face as a people in the coming years. It's not revolutionary, just a realistic description of our world and the challenges(opportunities) we face.