Jamie Rubin: Let's talk a little bit about how this aid is spent. One of the most prominent criticisms of foreign assistance is that this money is going to corrupt governments. Your boss, the Secretary General of the United Nations, has said that the first challenge for governments who want foreign assistance is to have good governance. How important is it that this money be spent without the kind of corruption that was associated with it in the past?
Jeff Sachs: Good governance is critical and one individual or crony regime can bring down a whole society. So this is something we know. We've even supported some of those, because they were the thugs on our side of the Cold War in some of these conflicts. So governance is critical. The mistake is the blind view that, well, it's all corruption out there, and therefore, there's nothing that can be done. Many people think of Africa as just one country, one big country with a mess that can't be solved, and with so much corruption and so forth, and this is a huge misunderstanding. There are many extremely well
governed countries, at least at the low levels of income that are trying desperately to get out of poverty, but don't have enough to run a health care system or can't run a school system, because there's just too much impoverishment or
too much disease or they're overrun by the AIDS pandemic. So we have to think in a lot more sophisticated way. No one wants to give money to a thuggish regime which is going to steal it, but what we have to understand and what my studies and many others have found when they've looked at this seriously is that there are impoverished places all over the world that are struggling with democracy, that are struggling with the social expenditure on health and education that are needed but are just too poor to get out of the trap, and those are the places that need the help.
If we were reliably helping those countries and holding back on the others, well, it would be a
completely different story. But even the countries that well governed and are desperate for the help and the partnership, they also are not getting the level of help that they need.
Jamie Rubin: Now a lot of people would listen to you, Jeff Sachs, and they'd say "he's an idealist, but in the real world, the way the famous philosopher Hobbes talked about it, life is nasty, brutish and short." Do you really think that even with another penny on the $10 that we're going to eliminate poverty around the world? That we're going to create a situation where there's no poor people, there are no people with no medicine and no health care? Is that . . . is that really a plausible long term goal?
Jeff Sachs: I actually don't think life is nasty, brutish and short, or that it, that it has to be, let's say. Certainly in our country through generations of economic progress and a lot of help for desperately poor people so their children could go to school or go to, uh, see a doctor or have clean water through all of the efforts that have been made, we were able to eliminate that kind of poverty that kills, and so have many, many other societies in the world, and we've learned how to cooperate and we've learned how to rise above the Hobbesian war of all against all. We can do this. In fact, the part of the world that's in the extreme impoverishment that Cambodia is and that many other countries are, that part of the world is shrinking, because economic development is proceeding. And this makes it so utterly possible if we combine our great prowess through the wealth and the technology and the science and the learning that we've developed and address it to that part of the world that so urgently needs it, we actually could solve these problems in partnership with these countries. They are desperate for it.
Jamie Rubin: So you think global poverty is a solvable problem at a cheap price.
Jeff Sachs: Just as John Maynard Keynes said in 1930, in the middle of the Great Depression, that poverty could be eliminated in England. People said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Just look at what economic growth can do if we look down to the possibilities for our grandchildren," as he put it. Well, that was true in England, and it's true in the United States, and it was true in many countries in the world. We can now do this on the global scale. We can do it if we understand that while a lot of the progress will necessarily come from within the countries, no doubt about it. With a helping hand, we can make this a worldwide process with magnificent results, not only for the impoverished, but for the world that we ourselves and our children live in.
Jamie Rubin: Some of the anti-globalization activist groups look at a problem like Cambodia and this fiber optic cable and, and they wonder whether this is a, a created situation where a cable was being put in,
and rather than providing kerosene or foreign assistance for the people who need it, a global project to the benefit of the rich countries was put in place. And I guess the counter argument is that any job in this part of the world is better than no job. How do you balance this problem?
Jeff Sachs: I think first the premise is not correct that this is just for rich people, this cable. This is a cable that Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia will use to hook up to the Internet. Now I'm going to villages all over the world where people are using the Internet. Not very many people because they haven't had the access; they haven't been able to hook up. But the idea that this is somehow just for us and not for them is a huge mistake.
Jamie Rubin: But in Cambodia, I think, is the lowest Internet usage in the world. It's more expensive to use the Internet than it is to provide food and medicine for six months for a person in Phnom Penh.
Jeff Sachs: One will find that the Internet is used in Phnom Penh to help this budding textile and apparels sector to be able to place its orders, to receive the fashion design instructions, and that it will actually be used for business purposes, as well as for a lot of other purposes. In Southern India I've been involved with a number of the states in Southern India where Internet use in the villages, in very poor villages, has taken off because it's quite, quite an amazing thing. And where the scientists there have been able to develop a very low cost way of distributing the Internet within the village itself. It's experimental, but it's actually quite amazing.
Jamie Rubin: Some people look at this fiber optic cable project and they say these people are suffering through this terrible work conditions in order for the upper classes, the rich international communications consortium to have Internet usage, when in Cambodia they don't use the Internet because they're too poor.
Jeff Sachs: I think first the, the premise is wrong, because the Internet actually will be used by poor people, as well as rich. This is something that we're seeing in India and elsewhere. But I think there's a more general point also. The anti-globalizers think that somehow hooking up to the global economy is either so dangerous or so wrong headed that countries like Cambodia should just step back. That's not really Cambodia's problem, the global economy. Cambodia's problem is that coming from a situation of impoverishment and then civil war and genocide. Cambodia was outside of the process of economic development and growth for decades, while costal China, while neighboring Thailand, even Vietnam after the war ended, were able to achieve economic development by joining the world economy. Now what's true is that if we were to look at any of these countries step by step out of the impoverishment, it's pretty grim. The lives of the impoverished are grim. That's why we ought to help to diminish that, uh, extent of suffering and to help make reliable and much more rapid the escape from impoverishment. But there is a way out. It does involve joining the world economy, but it also means a helping hand from the rich that have already made it.
Jamie Rubin: Let's talk about who can provide that helping hand. Some people say that it's really not government's job, that government is not an international social worker, but that much of the money available is in the hands of corporate America or the business community the wealth in the hands of individuals. How do you assign the various responsibilities for providing that helping hand?
Jeff Sachs: It's also true that in our economic system, business is not primarily philanthropic in its outlook; it's there to make money. And on the whole we do quite well out of that, because our market based economic system with profit maximizing business, while it's
got its slips, no doubt, has produced an incredible amount of, of productivity and material well being. We can't look to be out of charity, as it were, or even out of foreign policy (Laughs) or out of security or out of all the interest that we have in this. We can't look to business to be the source of the billions of dollars that it will take. Only governments acting on behalf of all of our joint interest in living in a safer world can do that. But we can't let business off the hook by any means. Business has a role, first being a responsible partner in this, and our businesses can act with a lot of impunity and corruption and so forth in those places, and that is to nobody's advantage, even to our own business. We see over and over again that, uh, the corrupt path is not a way to run a business in the long term. More than that, business in our society has a lot of the technology, a lot of the organization and management skills that are vitally needed for development success. Our businesses, the drug companies, they've helped, together with our
government, to make these wonder drugs to fight AIDS, the anti-retroviral medicines.
Jamie Rubin: Aren't they too expensive for the people in Cambodia and Africa to buy?
Jeff Sachs: And if the drug companies are responsible partners with the donor governments so that the companies are selling those drugs just at the cost of producing them, not at prices way above cost, which they might sell under patent protection, but if they're responsible partners selling at the low cost and the donors are buying at the low cost on behalf of these impoverished people that couldn't even afford that low cost, well, then you get this kind of public sector leadership together with private sector responsibility in which both sectors contribute to help solve the real problems of the poorest of the poor. So we have to step back from the ideology or the conception that it should be all one or all other, and understand that each part has its own role to play, but a role which fits within the basic character of the public sector and the private sector.
Jamie Rubin: Jeff Sachs, thank you for joining me.
Jeff Sachs: Oh, thank you very much.
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