Jeffrey Sachs Quotes

#1. The highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#2. It's the American leadership that has not played the role it should be playing and that leaders in other countries have been playing.

Jeffrey Sachs

#3. In my view, there is an urgent need to communicate with the public and help to explain where there is consensus, and where are there doubts about the issues of sustainable development.

Jeffrey Sachs

#4. They did not understand that by liberalizing imports, the government was also promoting exports.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#5. the United States will need substantially more revenues to close the budget deficit, especially recognizing the need to increase federal spending in certain critical areas. I

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#6. White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.

Jeffrey Sachs

#7. Devaluations are never easy.

Jeffrey Sachs

#8. It is easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of economic policy: the life satisfaction of the population. That ultimate goal should be unassailable for a country founded precisely to defend the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#9. reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#10. Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.

Jeffrey Sachs

#11. The aspiration of society is the flourishing of its members, this report gives evidence on how to achieve societal well?being. It's not by money alone, but also by fairness, honesty, trust and good health.

Jeffrey Sachs

#12. Our greatest national illusion is that a healthy society can be organized around the single-minded pursuit of wealth.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#13. Basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does.3 For

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#14. Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.

Jeffrey Sachs

#15. The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#16. History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#17. Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#18. We need the rich today to do their modest part to enable all of society to share in prosperity. By passing that hurdle, we would reduce the need for long-term transfers from rich to poor in the future. The

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#19. This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment.

Jeffrey Sachs

#20. I believe myself that there's a great deal more interest and engagement among Americans than our politicians recognize.

Jeffrey Sachs

#21. The rich do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the economic ladder ... Economic development works. It can be successful. It tends to build on itself. But it must get started.

Jeffrey Sachs

#22. Senior development specialists in the Treasury can be counted on one hand. America's government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments.

Jeffrey Sachs

#23. Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world.

Jeffrey Sachs

#24. Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain.

Jeffrey Sachs

#25. If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that's coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that's coming due within 30 to 90 days.

Jeffrey Sachs

#26. We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program.

Jeffrey Sachs

#27. Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.

Jeffrey Sachs

#28. At the most basic level, the key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development.

Jeffrey Sachs

#29. We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#30. It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency.

Jeffrey Sachs

#31. It's quite possible to arrive in the year 2030 where people are no longer dying of poverty. We could actually help lead a global end-not a reduction, but an end-to absolute poverty ... I have always found that a committed, powerful group of leaders, can make a huge difference.

Jeffrey Sachs

#32. We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

Jeffrey Sachs

#33. The truth of good economic doctoring is to know the general principles, and to really know the specifics. To understand the context, and also, to understand that an economy may need some tender loving care, not just the so-called hard truths, if it's going to get by.

Jeffrey Sachs

#34. world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#35. The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty.

Jeffrey Sachs

#36. If we did go into a recession, something that's always possible for the U.S. or Europe, we could lower interest rates and expand the money supply without worrying about the price of gold.

Jeffrey Sachs

#37. The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule.

Jeffrey Sachs

#38. My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few.

Jeffrey Sachs

#39. We've taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well.

Jeffrey Sachs

#40. The idea that the UN system could provide real leadership on the great development challenges will strain credulity in some quarters.

Jeffrey Sachs

#41. We have entered a new era. Global society is interconnected as never before. [...] I suggest that we have arrived in the Age of Sustainable Development.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#42. In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows ... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years.

Jeffrey Sachs

#43. Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It's been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren't really coming to pass.

Jeffrey Sachs

#44. sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#45. I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.

Jeffrey Sachs

#46. The current situation reminds me too much of the fable of the
farmer whose chickens are dying. The local priest gives one remedy af-
ter another - prayers, potions, oaths - until all of the chickens are dead.
"Too bad," says the priest, "I had so many other good ideas.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#47. Our challenge, our generation's unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. Our planet is crowded to an unprecendented degree. It is bursting at the seams. It's bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms, and in ecological terms

Jeffrey Sachs

#48. We are not at war (except with our own demons).

Jeffrey Sachs

#49. Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#50. Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#51. The world got side-tracked from development issues during the post-9/11 crisis period.

Jeffrey Sachs

#52. We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.

Jeffrey Sachs

#53. The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view.

Jeffrey Sachs

#54. In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better.

Jeffrey Sachs

#55. The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet.

Jeffrey Sachs

#56. The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#57. The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.

Jeffrey Sachs

#58. Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope and that we worked together to heal the world.

Jeffrey Sachs

#59. our common humanity made it possible to find common cause in the midst of competition and that peace depended on our own virtue and ethical behavior.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#60. There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#61. is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights - the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation - the right to breathe air as nature provided it - the right of future generations to a healthy existence?10 Kennedy

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#62. Soil mapping is one of the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development

Jeffrey Sachs

#63. There's a lot of strength in the U.S., but there's a lot of froth also. The froth will blow off. We're going to have to face up to some realities that we're not fully facing up to right now.

Jeffrey Sachs

#64. Let's start fresh with Russia on some real help and some real reform.

Jeffrey Sachs

#65. The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.

Jeffrey Sachs

#66. The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed.

Jeffrey Sachs

#67. The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.

Jeffrey Sachs

#68. The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.

Jeffrey Sachs

#69. We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.

Jeffrey Sachs

#70. Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else.

Jeffrey Sachs