International Advocate for Peace Award Acceptance Speech
Jeffrey Sachs**
The Eighth International Peace Award Recipient***
Thank you so much. Those were two wonderful, kind intro- ductions. I was reminded, as you were talking, about how in academia we have some very special things to add to the world. Not only do we gain knowledge within the academic community, but we share this knowledge to help solve global problems.
We are living in an extraordinary time. On the one hand, for example, our tools are so powerful that we can realistically think about ending deaths from malaria, a discussion I was having with African ambassadors just a few minutes ago. We can realistically think about ending extreme hunger on the planet because we have developed the fantastic science of water management, high-yield seeds, soil nutrient management, new agro-ecology and new con- servation agriculture. Given the wealth and knowledge we have, if we ever stopped to calmly think about it, we would recognize a phenomenal ability to do things. Yet, let’s be clear: at the same time we are also on the verge of chaos in this world. The world is unsafe, unstable and probably getting worse. We are fighting an obviously preposterous and tragic war. It was built on the tissue of lies from the start. Yet, we are spending half a trillion dollars for that in direct costs, and another half a trillion dollars for all the things we don’t count, such as the decades of pain and suffering and disability that our community will bear. And this is not even including the costs that are imposed on hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: deaths, massive disarray and unthinkable amounts of suffering.
So the world right now is a really peculiar place. We have the phenomenal capacity to solve problems and the phenomenal capacity to really mess things up. We have to puzzle through how we can get this right – and I can think of no better place to do it than a law school dedicated to great international legal challenges and a journal like the journal on conflict resolution. The role of the economist is to keep saying how low cost the real solutions are. The example that drives me crazy is the following. To control ma- laria, the best technology we have these days is the anti-malaria bed net. This might seem like a humble technology, because bed nets have been around for a very long time. But now bed nets are manufactured in a sophisticated way so that they retain the insecti- cide for about five years without the need for re-treatment; this is a huge advancement for poor communities. There are three hundred million sleeping sites in malaria transmission regions of Africa. Three hundred million sleeping sites must be protected with a net like this. Each net cost $5. Here is where my PhD always comes in handy: three hundred million, times five turns out to be $1.5 bil- lion. Now, here’s where some long division is interesting. This year, the United States is spending $650 billion on the military. If you divide $650 billion by 365 days, you find that we are spending $1.7 billion a day on the military. For one day’s Pentagon spending we could protect every sleeping site in Africa for five years against Malaria. $1.7 billion is a rounding error for a macro economist! I am the last macro economist dealing in billions…