YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeffrey Sachs

lines on the record: 90
first: 2015-03-31
most recent: 2015-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so, if you want to know about the problem, get out there and learn about it. And don't think that you're going to find it in your data set. And for that, we need a different kind of epistemological approach and a different kind of teaching approach as well. I want our students out on the hospital wards, as it were, but that means being out in the world, working and solving problems, and dealing with people across many different fields and many different parts of our social systems to be able to aggregate to and integrate into meaningful holistic solutions.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Statistical exercises that actually miss the point. And just a final word about that. We have so much statistical machinery to ask the question, what can you learn from this data set? But that's the wrong question because the data set is always a tiny, tiny fraction of what you can know about the problem that you're studying.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brilliant geniuses, very few who could sit in an office and think great thoughts and contribute to the world. It's a very small number, by the way. And then I've met lots of people who generalize, which doesn't move me because I don't find it helpful. I find it distracting or confusing or misguided or misplaced. Most of us mortals, I think the deep engagement in real problems is crucial. I wouldn't want to train doctors without the medical students walking the wards with their mentors. I don't like training economists without them grappling with real problems in real places and learning the complexity of the interacting physical Technological, political, economic, natural systems. It's the complexity.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is essential because we're dealing with very complex phenomena. And the complex phenomena do not lend themselves to slogans or to easy answers or to single solutions. They're more like engineering problems or agronomy problems or health problems. You have to understand the context, the technologies you have at hand, the choice sets that you really have in order to be constructive in this. Now there may be room for a few pure theorists in a field like this. In my life I've met a few”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second is how markets function. And so both of those provide a wealth of useful knowledge for Human betterment. But what economists tend not to do is to get into the details, as it were. And we think that the general knowledge is sufficient. And that, I think, is a mistake because as I've Tried to describe in our conversation now, and as I've learned in 35 years of work in the field in more than 125 countries, The context”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my view, we have too few of those. That's why I'm constantly arguing for both more aid, which grants, but also more financing through institutions, because I think both of these can improve the human condition, make the world safer, help poor countries get out of their crises, and so forth. And Exembank is not my favorite institution, but I think it's fine. I think it should be improved. There are many specific issues of this financing, which I'm not too keen on, but I would like longer term 20 or 30 year loans for infrastructure mainly to low-income countries. And Exembank is a little bit of a model for that, but we could do better. In terms of what do economists know, a lot is the answer. Really a Lot of powerful insights into two kinds of issues that are core to economics. One is managing scarce resources as a general problem.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess the question on exembank, I'll just make it more general. The big returns to investment in the coming decades, in my view, are largely in the low and the middle income countries, not surprisingly, because they're capital scarce, because they have a big capacity to catch up, they have a big human need also. In an idealized world, a tremendous amount of finance would flow from the savings in high-income countries to capital stock in low and middle income countries. Of course, some of that happens, for instance, to China, to Mexico in the past. But it's relatively constrained because there are huge institutional barriers, not the least of which is getting repaid for these loans when they're cross-border. institutions which facilitate that kind of international capital flow can be very good at global improvement.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Syria had a huge drought, the biggest in its modern history from 2006 to 10. It led to many social ramifications that contributed to the explosion of violence starting in 2011. And this The fact of these ecological crises turning into social catastrophes, I think is a very real phenomenon. We should not presume that somehow we'll just be able to handle this stuff because I'm told constantly crisis leads to crisis leads to innovation and solution. And the truth is that sometimes true and sometimes crisis leads to catastrophe.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the water issue is a pervasive global issue. Colleagues of mine published in PNAS a few weeks ago and then another article, one on the fact that with climate change, the models show that the American Southwest and Great Plains are likely to dry very, very significantly during the 21st century. The climate models basically show massive water problems in many places in the world. And for two big reasons, many dry places now which are often on the descending zone of convective forces like the Hadley cell become drier with climate change because these Convective forces become more powerful, and second, in general, with higher temperatures of apotranspiration is faster so the soils drive. Absolutely comports with what I see with my own eyes in many places.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which George Orwell depicted we already have a mass surveillance state in this country, probably not so far from here. I hope they're listening. I expect every time I pick up the phone, I used to say, I know hello, NSA, I know you're listening. And then I was told it's probably six intelligence agencies listening. Now, all I'm saying is, like all the things we discussed, I believe that artificial intelligence and robotics is real, deep, transformative, potentially for the good, possibly for the bad, and therefore a matter of analysis and choice.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What machines do, what smart machines have been doing for 200 years is allowing us to ease that physical burden. And what robots we've had robots for a long time now, they're just getting smarter and smarter because they have microprocessors now and artificial intelligence. They're allowing humanity to escape from a very heavy load. So in principle, this is a nice thing. This is where we would like to go. But if it leads to turmoil, massive inequalities of power and income and wealth, or by the way, the other dystopian Possibilities that”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What everyone in the world wants. And as soon as you can get out of agriculture, people do. That's why we're down to 1% of our labor force in agriculture. It's very hard work. And when you watch people bent over for eight hours in the fields in Africa today, it's no joy for their lives. It's extraordinarily difficult. I say all of this because”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They play, they lie around, they eat some bamboo shoots, a little sex now and then. Basically, it's a pretty leisurely existence. We're told by anthropologists that that's not so much unlike hunter-gatherer societies in the pre-Neolithic. We got into a different mode about 10,000 years ago, became sedentary, human populations rose, and for the next 10,000 years, people broke their backs trying to stay alive, growing food. So we got into a kind of mode where basically very, very, very hard labor. And the big quest of modern times is actually to get out of that hard, heavy physical labor.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, the robotics are a kind of immigrant, so they're competing with other workers that provide some services that are being replaced by the machines or by the artificial intelligence system. So there is a big distributional effect, in my view. Those who own the robots, as it were, whether it's Larry Page and Sergei Brin or others make a fortune, and those who own the labor that is being substituted see a real decline of their income. Now, again, conceptually, the idea that machines could do the heavy lifting for us is a good Thing for society. And I had, I don't know if it's a real insight or not, but I went to Virunga National Park in Rwanda. A couple of years ago to visit the great apes, the gorillas. And you spend this remarkable time in the bamboo forest watching them. What do they do all day?”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what I would like us to study. I would like economists to be working with engineers, to be working with public health, to be working with the medical professionals, so that we're actually working on the real systems of our time and adding our pieces to that, but understanding and studying that so that we have an answer to robotics, not a pure theoretical model, which is nice and fun, but something that can be helpful.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compensate for that by never getting into detail has been our approach. But we're always behind the curve then. We never have good answers when they're needed.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, more like the biologist. So if Watt and Watson and Crick had written their 1953 paper saying n base pairs and they can match by n times n minus 1 over two combinations, it wouldn't be a very good model of DNA, but they actually said there are four base pairs and there are two natural matchings and it happens to be a double helix. And we're going to study the detail out of that for the next 40 years. Yeah, it's arbitrary, you know, there could be other DNA, but we're going to study this one. Now, economists don't do that because we have a harder job, actually, in some sense, which is that we're not studying a stable Environment. We're studying a changing environment. So, whatever we study in depth will be out of date. We're looking at a moving target.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, economics, we avoid that, I think. Conceptually, because if you study anything too specific, it's out of date in 10 years. So we study general principles. I think that's epistemologically. Weakness of our field because we want to be the four underlying natural forces of the social universe rather than studying specifics.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's fascinating for us in our real lives and in our societal choices is the change that we're constantly living in during this past 230 years since Watt gave us the steam engine. And we've been in 230 years of relentless change. Technological change, structural change, societal change, cultural change. And yet our economics models are basically static, meant to be timeless. And if we really want to understand the world, we need to go deep into understanding what Baxter is doing or how Watson the robot or Watson or what really is changing technologically. Concretely at the graduate level.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Handled can make everybody better off. So this question of how we're going to handle this transition is a really interesting one. I believe it's happening. I believe it's a fascinating subject for analysis and research. And I believe it's not been studied in very much depth yet. And that leads me to the second question, because it is a good segue. What do we learn in economics? And I believe not the right things And I'll take just this question. In my view, whether it's the geography questions or the manufacturing question that you asked about or the robotics or whatever it is.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is something right, actually, theoretically, about the argument that the demand for labor falls, the wages declined, and that can actually lead to a downward spiral in our economies. And so I have another, I have a paper from last year with Larry Kotlukov showing how that works. I have another paper coming out in a couple of weeks that I really like showing in an overlapping generations context how you can get weird outcomes. But what's always true is that with enough government intervention, redistribution of various kinds from old to young, for example, from capital owners to labor owners, of course you can make everybody better off because of pure technological change by definition, if properly...”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll have a very good idea. They'll welcome you by name, of course, as you arrive. We were expecting your 10 minutes late. Is everything okay, Mr. Sax? Because Google will know where you are any moment anyway. So that's coming, and it will transform fundamentally the labor market. Now, the interesting conceptual question is Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Now, as economists, we should say instinctively it's a great thing. Are you kidding? We can have the robots do all the work for us. And I believe that's what we've hoped for ever since leaving Eden when we were condemned to work in the fields 10,000 years ago in the Neolithic Revolution. We've been trying to escape heavy labor. And if the robots will do it, fantastic. But there is this actually deep conceptual question, which is what is it?”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very quick on robots. Fascinating. I'm a technophile and a techno-believer. And I do believe that we are in a very rapid ascent of information technology. And I believe that it is displacing lots of jobs and that it is one of the reasons for the low wages, the stagnation of real earnings in the economy because the path of manufacturing employment, which we talked about, has shrunk considerably chronically. More will come. It will also spread through the service economy as well. You don't need baristas in Starbucks. We will walk in. Soon to a Starbucks, and our iris will be scanned, and your default mode of mocholate will come out automatically of a machine and you'll take it out the other door.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To big diversion of attention and public investment actually from longer-term things, which in a way is how I would interpret our recent political history. In other words, Obama used his political capital for the wrong thing in that fiscal stimulus. But in any event, I have disagreed with Krugman, all through these years about this, and he kept saying, we're in a depression. I said, oh, we're recovering. And no, no, we're still in a depression. And then when we really recovered, he said, just as I said, we recovered because we had this 2009 stimulus. We recovered in the context of a significant fiscal cut, actually. Not what he recommended, because fiscal policy wasn't the decisive element of this business cycle.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Addressing a financial panic is a condition that needs to be addressed as its own pathology. And that's my view, that if you approached it that way, because I remember arguing with Summers that weekend and many weekends after that, approach it as unlocking the financial panic, not as the need for reaching a $1.6 trillion deficit in 2009. Just get credit going again. In that case, I think Bernanke, by the way, did the right thing, which was flood the market with liquidity, make extraordinary purchases, QE, all the rest I thought was the right policy in 2008-9, not the fiscal stimulus, because I didn't think it would work, I didn't think it was necessary, I thought it would lead to...”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and basically, by the way, he did, in my view, two things wrong. He misdiagnosed the 2008 crisis and second then gave the wrong prescription to it. And the misdiagnosis, in my view, is that it was not a Keynesian animal spirits crisis, meaning that suddenly there was just a collapse of investment and you needed fiscal stimulus to undo it. It was two things I would say. It was if you want to If you want to classify it, it was Hayekian displacement from a credit boom. But even that wasn't enough to lead to a crisis. It was Lehman Brothers failing. In September 14, 2008 that drove a financial panic”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he has told his readers two times a week for five years the simplest version of the crudest Keynesian model, which is the way out of a downturn is fiscal stimulus. I've worked on macroeconomic adjustment programs in dozens of countries, and for 35 years, I don't buy it. And so I think he really took a complicated subject and said there's one answer. And it comes back to the same approach.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting story. Yesterday he wrote about how horrible the UK government has been and how they're going to possibly win an election by telling the story that they've done a decent job economically. He's had a kind of venom for the government, my response, which I'll publish soon, is called something like Krugman's anti-Cameron vitriol, because it really is vitriolic. And what I did was just put the UK recovery next to the US recovery and they look almost identical. And he loves the Obama recovery, and he hates the UK. And he says one's awful, one's great. It's ideology. It's not fact-driven.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the general idea of Robert Barrow from 20 years ago that every time you approach by half the way to the frontier, you lose about two percentage points of growth is about right.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not right. It's happening. That's the story of our time. It's happening. That's one and a half billion, two billion people, two billion, say, including other parts of Southeast Asia. They're on an upswing, and that's great. It's wonderful. It's the most significant scaled improvement of material conditions in the history of the world in a short period of time. And it's deep. and it's great civilizations, great cultures, great capacity.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Krugman, too. There was this feeling in Cambridge for some reason 25 years ago. We don't like East Asia too much. I'm caricaturing just a little bit. And China's a bubble, the myth of the East Asian miracle, remember Krugman's article and so forth. They just got it wrong time and again. They have failed to understand. And same with Asimoglu. It's the same story. It doesn't fit our model exactly, so it can't happen. It's got to collapse.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of the long history of Japanese development, because of the 50-year history of Korean and Taiwanese Hong Kong Singapore development, and especially because of the post-1978 scale of China's achievement, East Asia is an absolutely key transformative growth pole of the world. This, I think, is of fundamental geopolitical and historical and economic significance.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's happened of fundamental significance for the world is that East Asia has become the third growth pole in the world, or arguably the second, because for the first 200 years of modern economic growth, it was all the North Atlantic. You could call that two regions or one, depending on how you want to define it, but it was the U.S. and Europe that defined 90% of the technological advance that created the underlying dynamics to which the whole rest of the world would engage in catching up or integration or falling under imperial rule or whatever it was.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the basic idea that in the midst of this revolution, Chavago said somebody has to just live. And so it's the most human, wonderful story. I am a complete sucker for it.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which part? Of course, everywhere. No, it's beautiful, and basically it's a truism and obvious, but how much of American music is African music? So we live on a culture that came from Africa through the Caribbean to jazz to so much. And when you watch African music, you see so much of the heritage roots and improvements of culture and music that you see here.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can make the phones if you're making the phones, you're making the same phones, whether it's in Thailand or in China, in Foxcom or wherever it is. Whereas if you're controlling disease, your disease burdens are different, your ecology is different, if you're growing food, it's different, and therefore the context is much more complex.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that worked here and planted here. The miracle of the double miracle of the Indian Green Revolution was actually two miracles. One was that crop yields went up quickly, but second, that they were from seeds from Sonora, Mexico that Norman Borlaug had taken to India, and lo and behold, after one year of a little bit of experimentation on how to plant them, he and MSwaminathan found that you could use Mexican seeds in the Indian context in the Punjab. So the point that Roderick may be emphasizing here or finding implicitly is that technologies diffuse at different rates depending on their capacity for standardization. And manufacturing is typically a very standardized global process.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an example of the ecological context and geography being important. The reason you can get manufacturing convergence of productivity easily is that those are standardized technologies, usually part of international value chains. The specs and the equipment and the machinery don't come domestically, they come internationally. The procedures, everything about the production systems are basically part of an international system. When it comes to agriculture, you're in a completely different world. What counts is your soil, your pests, your climate conditions, your crop varieties locally. And that's why technological diffusion in agriculture is much more complex. You cannot simply take most of the time.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best thing going for it is this tremendous room for catching up. And that means a lot of leapfrogging technologies and the fact that there is a true phenomenal, wonderful, powerful information revolution underway of which we're just in the early stages. We're still on the first slope of the S-curve in that. And that's great. But there are huge headwinds, of which I would say demography and climate change are two, plus the traditional facts for a lot of Africa, disease, tropical, very difficult tropical environment, and 14 landlocked countries, all of which make this a very special problem.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Puts forward, and I find sustainable development in Africa in those terms not feasible. I couldn't answer that question. What is a viable path? So when you think about the problems of development in very poor, difficult conditions as much of sub-Saharan Africa has right now,”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In incredibly difficult physical geographic conditions, very dry, drying most likely, warming, massive disease burden, most of them with no easy natural resource base, too far from ports to do any kind of assembly operations as a stepping stone to development. So just extraordinarily difficult. It's why I also worry about Africa's demographic trends, because obviously I think a lot about the difficulties of development, and you're mentioning some. But I think they're as hard as it is for Africa now with 1 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, Africa is going to have 2 billion people before the middle of the century on the current trajectory, and it's going to have around 4 billion people on the so-called medium variant fertility trajectory that the UN population division”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poor rural, overwhelmingly agriculture. So I'm not worried about the job route, but what I am worried about is the balance of payments, basically, which is that like any of us, we thrive if we can sell our services somehow. And that's true at a country level as it is at an individual level. And if you are a in an environment where you have nothing to sell you may have a comparative advantage, but if you have nothing to sell, it doesn't matter. Everybody, every place has a comparative advantage, but it doesn't necessarily make you prosperous. So I worry very much about places like Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Mali, because they're landlocked.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the question of how any low income country pays its way in the world, as I said, is a real question. If it weren't for that question, there is no shortage of identifiable jobs that Africa needs for the coming two generations. It needs teachers and it needs doctors and it needs construction work.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having to catch up today versus having to catch up 25 years ago, net net, I'd say better off now because the Basic tools for catching up with the information age are stronger now than before.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that there's any magic to manufacturing. What there is, crucially, is a need for all developing countries to export. You need to export because you need to import technology. Manufacturing has been a route to export earnings, to earning a place in the world that allows you to import the technology which 99.9% comes from outside your country. So the question to ask for Africa is how is it going to pay its way in the world? Not whether it's going to have manufacturing or not. And that's why, by the way, import substituting manufacturing was no great help for countries that pursued that to an excess. What has worked is export-oriented manufacturing. So maybe it'll be export-oriented services, mining, agribusiness. And other things. In general, if I ask the question is Africa disadvantaged by”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Mexico is a little bit, I would say just stepping back a little bit of a mystery for me why it hasn't done better in development.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably accurately rated, which is really strangely underperforming for a long time with a lot of difficulty, but 100 million people living in a kind of middle income stasis. And probably really facing the curse of so far from God so near to the United States. The paradox that somehow the U.S. has created as many problems as it's created opportunities. It has created a militarized narcotics trafficking and war on drugs, for example, which has been devastating for Mexico in modern times.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think that anthropology in the form of getting very deep texture, thick description of a society is a very important kind of approach, one of many. Second, we need anthropology of economics in the original literal sense of the word, which is a theory of man much better than we have. We have an 18th century theory of humanity in a world of 20th century evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and a century of psychological understanding. So we need a new anthropology in our field.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Because it basically Cells useful things to places that need useful things. And I believe that in general, our international capital markets underperform their role of financing international flows. So I think we need institutions to overcome the inherent shortcomings of international finance.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are. And I have to put it this way. I'm happy for the idea of cities to say we should do something different. I'm not happy to say we're going to take an extraterritorial place in your country. It's not going to be governed locally. It's going to have an external board. There are lots of specific features that never struck me as politically realistic, and they didn't turn out to be realistic.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source