JEFFREY SACHS

Jeffrey Sachs is the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and professor of health policy and management at Columbia University and a special adviser to UN Secretary-General António Guterres on sustainable development goals. He has also held many other important positions in economic development, global macroeconomics, and the fight against poverty. He is the author of The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), The Price of Civilization (2011), and other influential books.

Jeff and I sit on the boards of Ethics in Action, The Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa, and SDGUSA. Jeff and his wife Sonia are two of my dearest friends. Few have done more to reduce global poverty than Jeff Sachs. We spoke in his office at Columbia University.

Jeffrey Sachs: Your father was my first political love. I was fourteen in 1968, and I looked up to him during his run for the presidency. I had already thought about and learned about a lot of things, but it was the first presidential campaign where I was really paying attention. In primary school I had known about President Kennedy, and later I was energized against the Vietnam War. It was the beginning of my coming of age, and your father grabbed me and has never let go. I’ve continued, over fifty years, to refer to his wisdom, his leadership, and his eloquence. He really let everything loose in the 1968 campaign; it was the go-for goodness, something so deep and unusual, by a unique politician. People loved him. Everything came from his heart. It was not normal politics; he was reaching for something very different. That’s why it’s so important for us to think about him today, about what he did and what he stood for.

Robert Kennedy—and John Kennedy too—practiced the kind of leadership we desperately need. Their guidance can still help us today with the serious problems we face. You can study the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was a time when the two of them saved the world, and much of it had to do with the way they led.

What they did took courage, fortitude, and careful moral reasoning. When President Kennedy’s executive committee met, you had all the foreign policy and military specialists gaming the situation, guessing whether the missiles the Russians were putting in Cuba would be ready to launch or not, thinking about how many people might die in a first strike or what would happen if the Unites States retaliated. You had two people, with a couple of others in the room like Ted Sorensen, who thought about it completely differently. They thought about it in terms of a piercing insight, that on the other side of the divide were other human beings facing the same reality. They recognized that the way back from the very edge of disaster was to realize everyone on both sides just wanted to survive the confrontation. That’s not a military tactic. That’s not a poker bluff. That is a moral insight that sounds so simple and naive but is deeper than what was in anyone else’s head. The generals’ training led them to: “We’re good at bombing things, so let’s go bomb. That’s our role.” It took wise leadership—I would even say idealistic young leadership—to say, “Yes, of course, that’s your job, but our job is to reflect on the human stakes. We’re more than tactical decision makers. It’s our job to understand the demands of common humanity.” That’s how they intuited that [Nikita] Khrushchev had the same pressures, constraints, and insights they had. That basic insight was, “They don’t want war, and we don’t want war; we just need to diffuse this.” John and Robert Kennedy understood this.

One of the realities of John Kennedy’s administration, which I’ve studied at length, is that the war engine was always revving. Eisenhower, among others, warned us about this. The real responsibility of the president almost all the time has been to say no. It takes a lot of knowledge, insight, and courage to do that. I like President Obama, and I voted for him twice, but that war machine was always revving. He had his foot on the brake a lot of the time, but when he took it off, we ended up in a war in Libya that was completely unnecessary. We stirred up a war in Syria. Some of the worst aspects of American governance that your father and President Kennedy grappled with are still with us today. It worried President Truman that when the CIA was created in 1947, it had a contradictory and dangerous double mandate. It was to be both an intelligence agency, which we very much needed, and a covert army. Truman asked, “Why give both jobs to the CIA?” He was absolutely right, as history has shown us through the last seventy years. President Kennedy learned it when the Bay of Pigs became one of the big debacles of his administration.

This has happened frequently in our history. I hate it when there are covert operations to destabilize other countries and overthrow their governments. We have special ops in the military, too, which are similarly covert, unexamined, and under the control of people I don’t trust for a moment to control such things. John and Robert Kennedy knew how important it was not to let the military and the covert parts of the government run amok.

Kerry Kennedy: Yes, a great deal of my father’s time as attorney general was diverted to trying to gain control over the CIA. After the Bay of Pigs, the CIA engaged in a series of truly harebrained schemes to assassinate Castro, from planting an interesting poisonous shell somewhere he might see while scuba diving, to stealing his shoes and placing a poison in them that would cause his beard to fall out, on the theory that this would make the people of Cuba reject him. They were inept and ridiculous. When Daddy found out about it, he was furious. He hated communism and was against the Castro regime, but he was morally opposed to assassinating heads of state. He was later accused of trying to kill Castro and said, “Actually, I saved his life.”

In Cape Town, Daddy spoke with students about four dangers faced by young people who want to accept the responsibility of creating a better world. The first of them was futility, the belief that there’s nothing one person can do in the face of the enormity of the world’s ills; then expediency, timidity, and comfort. These are all ills that you’ve given your life to curing. Many people ask, “How can I do anything about global warming?” but you got the entire United Nations to say, “We are going to stop global warming.” People ask, “What can I do about disease?” You helped create PEPFAR, which does so much great work to stop HIV/AIDS. How do you find that kind of belief and commitment in yourself? Where does it come from? How do we get more people to feel, “I have a role to play; I can make a difference?”

JS: The essence of your father’s approach to public service was that idea from George Bernard Shaw he often cited: “Some see things as they are and ask why? I see things that never were and ask why not?” When he faced a problem he went to work figuring out a way to solve the problem. That’s what made him a leader. In President Kennedy’s American University speech in 1963, he talked about how many Americans believe peace is impossible, that it can’t be achieved, but then he says this is a defeatist view; our problems are man-made, and therefore they can be solved by man. This was what Robert Kennedy stood for. When you see problems, you try to solve them. It drives me crazy to see problems that I know are solvable but are not being solved. I spend most of my days saying, “Are you kidding? There’s no excuse for not doing something about that.” You have to understand the issues in sufficient detail to grasp what can be done, and it was also a characteristic of both John and Robert Kennedy that they had wonderful advisers, really smart people, and they sought those people out for help in understanding problems.

I was working on AIDS in Africa for a while when the anti-retroviral cocktail was just being developed and having positive results in the United States. I asked, “Why aren’t we doing this for other countries?” Answer: “There’s no budget for it. It costs $10,000 per person. It’s out of the question.” Well, I looked into it and found out the retail price of the medicine was $10,000, but the actual cost of production was maybe, in those days, $300. So I said, “Don’t charge them $10,000; charge them $300.” Answer: “Well, that’s a little bit tricky.” I had to pull apart the challenge to identify what could be done. This is where futility can kick in, so I had to think, “Of course we’re going to do this! I’m an economist; I can fill in the numbers. This doesn’t cost very much money. We should segment the markets. Why don’t we have a global fund? We can put the pieces together.” It happened, not as quickly as it should have, but it came together. A lot of good happened when resources were applied to these challenges. Once you understand the problem, you can figure out the solution, and then you can get the money together. It starts with knowing the problem can be solved. We can do a tremendous amount of good in this world. We shouldn’t accept things as they are. We should solve the problems we see. You have to start with the belief that there is something you can do. There’s something every person can do. Every problem can be solved. Maybe there are problems that can’t be solved, but you’ll never solve problems unless you believe you can. No effort is futile. That’s how you do it.

KK: One of my memories of my father is right after Dr. King died. We were at Hickory Hill, our family home in Virginia. When you walked into the house, immediately to the left there was a den, which we called the TV room because it was dominated by a huge television. I was eight years old and was sitting there with him, watching the news. We were watching Washington burn. My father said, “I’ve got to go there.” Forty-five minutes later I’m still sitting there, still watching the TV, and suddenly the camera pans and there is Washington in flames and there is Daddy standing in the midst of it. Right there on the screen. “There’s a problem, I’m going: I have a role to play, I’m going to fix that situation.”

The challenge is getting people out of the role of watching TV and into the role of stopping the flames.

JS: I will forever remember the night Martin Luther King was killed and your father went straight into the crowd. He had a depth of feeling and empathy that made it possible for him to connect with people who were brimming with grief and anger, and he had the confidence, and he had the belief that he could make a difference. That’s what it takes.

I was lucky to grow up in a caring, loving family, and I had a wonderful father who had social justice innately embedded in his character. He grew up in a working-class immigrant family that worked day and night to be able to get him an education. He became a labor lawyer and represented the trade unions in Michigan. He was one of the leaders of the Detroit ACLU and very much involved in civil rights in the city. We went to see Cesar Chavez in 1968, when he came to Detroit to talk about the farmworkers’ movement. That was the atmosphere I grew up in. My mother and grandparents were also role models for me; they had the same basic sense that these are not issues to debate but simply what it means to be a normal, good person. As a child when you see this, it definitely has an impact. I didn’t grow up in a religious way, but there is a Jewish idea, a very powerful idea, that I’ve always loved and taken to heart: It’s tikkun olam, which means “to heal a wound in the universe.” Every human being has the responsibility of trying to heal the world in some way. It’s a very beautiful idea. It’s not complicated. It’s just two words. It seems self-evident. What are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to help heal the world. When you’re young it’s just lucky to have examples like that.

KK: My father became attorney general when he was thirty-five, the third-youngest ever. He was always intent on reaching out to young people. He sought out young people in the United States and around the world. He spoke about young people in all his speeches. He said, “Our answer is the world’s hope; it is to rely on youth.” He believed in the next generation. As an educator, you’ve also shown a great commitment to the next generation.

JS: I’ve been in school, as a student and as a teacher, for the last fifty-seven years. From kindergarten through college and graduate school, I loved education. I became a professor in 1980 and have been a professor ever since. The remarkable and exhilarating essence of the university for me is that I still have the utter joy of working with young and idealistic people in formative moments of their lives. I believe that idealism is the most realistic attitude in life. It’s not some dreamy state of affairs; it’s a practical orientation to the kind of problem solving we’ve been talking about. I learn from my students every day. I started as a real academic doing the classic academic things, publishing articles and writing books. I was lucky enough to get tenured at a young age. I knew I wanted to do practical things; I had learned from my father to value the idea of professionalism, which meant mastery of a useful skill. I always believed that economics should be a useful art. It was in 1985, after I’d been teaching for five years, that I was asked to solve a real problem: an economic crisis in Bolivia. They had massive hyperinflation, 24,000 percent over the previous twelve months, and it was accelerating. It was a crazy situation. The fifty-peso coin, which was then worth practically nothing, was still the coin you needed to use in the pay phone booths, and you had to pay something between 5,000 and 10,000 pesos to get one fifty-peso coin. I was only thirty-one at the time; I brought assistants with me who were in their early twenties. In Bolivia they called them Sachs’s Angels, because of Charlie’s Angels, I suppose. People thought it was a little bit shocking to bring twentysomethings, but I believe it’s good to give responsibility to young people. They need guidance and mentorship, but they have energy, determination, and idealism.

Mentorship isn’t the norm in academia. We give lectures, students write papers, and they graduate. In medicine or crafts, for example, there’s more mentoring, and that serves to transmit the professionalism, spirit, and ethics of the profession. It’s important to have young people taking the lead in problem solving. You want people to participate in building their future, so they have to learn the skills and also how to take responsibility. You want to inspire them. You want to empower them. Education and practice are empowering. When you trust people, they rise to the occasion. This is something your father knew.

What goes with that, of course, is the idea of actively building the future. With youth, you’re probably building on idealism rather than on cynicism, and that’s important. As Jack Kennedy said, “We would trade with no other generation.” He and your father saw themselves as part of a young generation on a mission to solve their generation’s problems. Your father said, “It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.”

He warned against “the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence.” He said: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

I would like the future to say of our generation—these are my words—that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.