Jeffrey Sachs is one of the world's most influential economists. Known for his doctrine of "shock therapy" as an economic advisor for developing countries in the 1980s, the Columbia University professor has since embarked on a number of public health and poverty initiatives throughout the world. Last month, he delivered a speech at Dartmouth that detailed his efforts as Director of the United Nations Millennium Project and explained the need for targeted investments to remove developing economies from what he terms the "poverty trap." TDI caught up with him before his talk, entitled "Ending Poverty in Our Generation: Still Time if We Try," to discuss the broader context of his work and what it should mean to the current generation of students.

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How confident are you that my generation can solve the world's biggest problems?

I hope you do – because you're gonna need it. I think we've gone through a period in this country, for at least thirty years, where the predominant ethos has been Get Ahead. It's been a period where business and markets and self-interest have been predominant, and I don't think it's an accident that we've ended up in the ditch very seriously. I think we neglected a lot of basic things and became kind of a frenzied, over-driven, consumerist society.

I've been thinking a lot about your generation – because of my kids and my students – and what the data show, at least for the moment, is that the Millennials (if that's the right term) have a different set of values from the Boomers. Values that at least give us hope to get this better. To get it right.

First of all, there's a lot of evidence that today's student generation is much more open to diversity, and much more experienced in global realities. It's an attitude that's much healthier, because probably the biggest problem we have in the world is the difficulty of handling diversity. We see it with immigration right now, we've always had the problems with race and so on. But what I've seen in working all over the world is that divided societies pay very high costs for those divisions. And when they can overcome those divisions, and turn it into diversity, there's a huge advantage. So this is one area where it seems that your generation has a big advantage.

I'd say there's a second, very intriguing sign – of belief in the ability of government to solve problems. It runs against the grain in America because we're in a very anti-government mood and a very anti-government political period. And I can understand the skepticism, because the government's doing such a bad job in many ways, and has led us into disastrous wars and huge budget deficits and many problems. But I think these big problems in the world can't be solved simply by individuals or by market forces alone. Government really does have to play a role. That people under 30, in general, have some more confidence in that is good, and healthy.

And third is the high degree of voluntary participation. New NGO's are all over the campuses in America, which is really a big thrill for me to watch – and very different, I think, from what it was twenty years ago. So I feel very, very good about it.

But, I have to say, it's not really my job to want to paint an overly rosy picture, because I actually think we're in a lot of trouble in the United States. I think our society's hold on shared values is really fragile right now. I'm not impressed with our politics, I'm depressed with our ability to have a civil discussion outside of the campus. I think the campus is unique as able to maintain a highly coherent and cogent debate, but for a lot of society, we're in a very bad way. The way we've run down so much of our society, the way we have such huge inequalities, the lack of trust in society, environmental risks – these are big problems that America faces. I don't want to be to down, but I do want to say there's a lot of work ahead.

With Congress shifting to the right, what do the next few years hold for international development assistance? You've mentioned that foreign aid is often viewed as poor politics in Washington – is there any kind of momentum for the plans you're recommending?

No, there's definitely not momentum for these issues. Lack of momentum doesn't make them wrong, but, in any event, it does make it hard. I've found this whole period to be rather bizarre, because I've been fighting for development assistance and debt relief for 25 years: back in the 1980's for Bolivia, Poland, and Russia; in the 1990's to try to scale up the fight against the AIDS, TB, and Malaria pandemics; and this decade for the Millennium Development Goals. It's really a funny thing, because you never know when you're going to succeed and who, actually, will be your allies. Bolivia's debt relief came in the Reagan administration, Poland's in the Bush administration, the Clinton period had almost no discernible results in this area (aid budgets were cut sharply – it was only in the very last year, and under a lot of pressure, that the administration was able to get some debt relief onto the table), then George W. Bush was a supporter of scaling up the fight against AIDS, and Obama has so far not really delivered anything, or tiny amounts. So you never know how this is gonna go.

I, in general, hold the view that our political leaders would find that this is much better politics than they think. Of course, they've won elections – I haven't. But I do believe that there's more in this than they know, and that Americans would like to be proud of what we're doing, feel good about it, and that they would see how a higher image in the world would also help our security. We just have not found the right way to do this. I see failure after failure in Afghanistan as the most glaring of the recent failures – where, if you read Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars, it's basically 300 pages without a sentence (that I could find) about developmental approaches to Afghanistan's problems. And I think this is a kind of blind spot in Washington. They don't get it, they don't think hard enough about it, they don't understand the domestic politics, and they don't understand the international politics. So I'm gonna keep pressing on it.

Would you ever consider running for office?

Uh, well, I think that for this agenda, probably the best that I can do is to keep pounding away the way I'm doing.

Spending is a political sin these days, and the development packages you call for greatly exceed what we currently give. How drastically would the political mood of the country need to shift in order for plans of your scale to make it through Congress?

Well, what I am talking about, in fact, is fractions of one percent of our national income. So I'm actually not talking about gargantuan sums. In fact, last week I was in an unsuccessful attempt to raise the US contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria by $1 billion a year. $1 billion a year is $3 per American per year. So it's maybe a Starbucks mocha latte or something. And it's 1/100th of what we're spending in the Afghanistan war, which I regard as a completely futile and wasteful effort. So I can find the areas where I think we ought to shift, and find that little bit extra for things I think would serve our humanity, geopolitics, and security all at the same time. The amounts are large when stated as billions of dollars, but very small when compared to our ability to mobilize that or find where it can come from.

In general, I think that we're making a very bad decision on how we balance development versus military approaches to security. Our military budget is more than $700 billion and our development budget, if you count it in the most generous way, is $30 billion, so it's less than 1/20th of the military budget. And I think that's even a generous count, because half of that is to Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other hot spots, mainly to support wars. If we actually rebalanced the military approach to security and what I call the sustainable development approach, I could find all the budget we'd need for that well within the boundaries of modest readjustments of our military budget.

Can celebrities have a real impact on causes like development assistance? I know you've traveled to Africa with Bono a few times...

Obviously, Bono's a great guy. Obviously. Really amazing. I haven't seen him in several months but I think they're on tour still, actually.

He's been unique, I would say. There are many people involved, but Bono has been not only a highly visible advocate, and somebody able to mobilize a big constituency, but he's gotten into the absolute nitty gritty of the issues. He's been a negotiator and he's been a policy advisor, so he's played a very big role. There are many actors and musicians and so on who are very much involved, and I think their overwhelming role is to help the world know what's going on, because people listen. They're very talented people, also – it's not by accident that these people become stars. In a lot of cases, at least the ones I know, it's not only their voices or their ability to write music, it's that they're very, very sharp. So they've made a very big difference.

In much of your writing, you discuss the gap between rich and poor throughout the world. That gap is growing within the United States as well. Are there principles or practices of development economics that can be applied at home?

Absolutely. Indeed, I think that the strategies are very similar, actually. Also true is that the countries most equal at home, and most attentive to the needs of their own poor, are also the countries most generous in development assistance. The paragons on both accounts are the Scandinavian countries. Those countries have basically eliminated poverty at home, and they are quite generous in development assistance abroad, because they have an attitude that we're all in this together – that modest sacrifices by the well-to-do aren't really sacrifices at all, but investments in human well-being that benefit everybody. I've spent a lot of time in those societies, I find them very attractive. In America, they're sometimes fighting words almost – the claim is that Obama's making us socialist like Europe. I read someplace in the last couple days that he's making us like the Europeans and they're zombies over there. And it was obviously written by somebody who'd never been. They have a very high quality of life, and we could learn a lot from some of the things they do, in terms of making the labor market better, in terms of ensuring a high level of education can be reached by everyone in society, and making the healthcare system far more efficient – lower-cost and higher benefit.

I think that part of America's problem is that there's a lot of propaganda. It's more and more clear who's paying for it – it's a lot of wealthy people who want to keep their taxes low – and I think it has distorted the debate so much that people are confused. There's a lot of misinformation. It's very hard to break through when you have either the screaming of Fox television or the real propaganda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page or shockingly nasty websites that I find to be less than edifying in terms of really having a political discussion.

I don't understand it. As an old fogey, let me say: this whole idea of the blogging behind pseudonyms, where you have no responsibility at all for what you say and the game is to shout as loud as you can, as obnoxiously as you can, and – in many places – absolutely as vulgarly as you can, I think it's really disappointing. If we did social networking where it was a real discussion, and people stood up with their real identities, I think the quality of discussion would be phenomenally higher.

Do you see a potential corrective within the blogosphere, where you have economic writers like Paul Krugman, James Surowiecki, and Matt Yglesias writing for a more popular audience?

Yeah. For sure. This is what I'm counting on – that we really get back to a good, civil, complex discussion. These are not simple issues. They don't have an easy yes or no – much less a “You're a fool” or “You're an idiot” kind of answer. And maybe the blogosphere will kind of sort itself out to be more socially constructive. It will be interesting to see whether the internet gets taken over by the same kind of mass-media conglomerate money that owns Fox TV and the other media outlets that I think have done tremendous damage to our public discussion. It's an open question – no one knows how this is going right now.

Amongst the intelligentsia, at least, there's a lot of discussion about economic issues today. Even for those not directly involved in economics, there are more entry-points into the discussion than ever. But then you have these polls that say our national economic IQ is extremely poor. How do we make these economic conversations diffuse throughout society more? And how important is it that our country achieves a higher economic intelligence?

I think it's hugely important. I think the quality of our public discussion is appalling right now. But I also would hold President Obama and others accountable for that much more. I'll give one example that really grates on me, which is that the President never put forward a healthcare plan during the whole debate over sixteen months. It was all negotiated in the congressional committees – and, to a large extent, in the back room. So there was never a time for a focused debate over a specific text. Where we could actually ask questions about different hypotheses, different theories on the table. And it wasn't until the bill was suddenly passed – with a last-moment maneuver that none of us really understood anyway – that we really even knew what was in the bill. It took a long time to kind of piece it together, and I'm not sure I have it completely right – and I'm an expert on this stuff.

Many times during the sixteen months of debate, I'd listen to the President and I honestly would not know what he was talking about. After his first summer, he gave a speech to the country and I remember thinking, God, I teach in the School of Public Health at Columbia, I'm a professor in this area, I'm an expert on this – I don't know what he said. And the reason was that they had a theory of the politics of the issue, which was: don't allow yourself to be taken hostage in a specific plan. Keep everything fluid, and everything in the back-room, and we'll negotiate with the key interests and somehow get this through.

Climate change has been roughly the same, and that one completely capsized. My view is that if we wanted to have a serious public discussion, the President would first perhaps put a green paper out, which would say, “Here are some basic ideas,” and have a blogosphere charge on them, and have a real discussion. Get national leaders engaged – experts as well as the general public. Then there'd be a white paper, and this would be the government's program. It would again generate discussion. Then there would be draft legislation that would actually be online, and you could come and make comments about it and you could make a national discussion about these things. And we would use this new technology to govern ourselves, in a different way. We'd use it as a facility to really have an organized debate and get to the issues. And we've done almost the opposite.

What's happened in the last two years, in one issue after another, they've tried to get something through by negotiating with vested interests in the corridors of Congress. A couple of times they've gotten things through, but many times it's gotten completely stuck. The public's been railing about this one way or another, but in very ill-informed and unfocused debates, because there's nothing on the table that you can actually understand. And it's very hard to debate a 1200 page piece of legislation that's cobbled together in a closed-door committee session in Congress.

These should be great tools for deliberation. All of the sudden we have the mechanics to have a national discussion. But we don't have that in any coherent way. Maybe the government doesn't understand the tools, or they're running away from them, but Obama could have innovated on how to use the internet, to actually organize public deliberation, and he's chosen not to so far. I think it's a huge loss.

So with the political sphere constituted as it is, how does someone like a graduating Dartmouth student gain entrée to it?

The problem with our politics, overwhelmingly, is that it is a money- and vested-interest-driven politics right now. It's not really a well-functioning democracy of either the deliberative form or the “broad representation of public values” form. It's so money- and campaign-driven right now, and that means lobbyists and major campaign contributors and now corporations (who can, without any disclosure, make multi-billion dollar campaign attack ads) are free to roam. And I think this is our core problem.

So, getting into the political system in this form – it may be a way to get rich, eventually, as you rotate between congressional staff and lobbyist and banker. This revolving-door is a fairly common career path right now for some lucky few who want to capitalize on it. But it's not politics the way one would want it to be. And I think what we need to do is engage in a variety of ways and a variety of protests and a variety of groups to say, “This is not America. This is not what we want.” And I think the student generation can probably have a huge impact on this. This young generation played a huge role in electing Obama. There is big disappointment right now, all signs show, but there's especially disappointment with the nature of the political system, and I think it's time to start going after that. My view is: get the vested-interests under control so that the public voice can be heard again. 

Watch Professor Sachs's lecture here. You can view his slides here.