An expert disappoints

Now, Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known American economist who has played adviser to governments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and who now heads the Earth Institute at Columbia University, joins the debate with his own views on what the world needs to do if it is to escape annihilation.

Sachs' scope is much broader, however. In his view, rising carbon levels in the earth's atmosphere pose but one challenge to our future. The other clear and present dangers are the demographic challenge, the mind-numbing poverty of millions of people across the globe, and the ineffectiveness of governments to create mechanisms to fight these menaces.

Like with his earlier book, The End of Poverty, which prescribed solutions to eradicate the scourge by 2025, Sachs now speaks of setting benchmarks and realising goals with the year 2050 as target. This gives the book an unreal, oracular texture. Right through reading it, I kept wishing Sachs had read Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the writer of the 2007 global bestseller, The Black Swan, before embarking on this work. In that charming book, Taleb denounces the peculiar academic tendency for grand theorising by showing that most major, truly ground-shifting, events in history could not have been predicted. The rise of the Internet was one such "black swan".

Much of what Sachs argues is not new. What is one to make of his assertion that "the world's population growth remains too rapid", while simultaneously quoting an Economist article that cautions against giving credence to a "Malthusian catastrophe". He advocates a decline in fertility rates in the developing world by a series of measures, and builds on this to forecast a global population of eight billion or less for 2050.

Sachs' advocacy of certain ideas, like exhorting rich nations to contribute 2-3 per cent of their national incomes towards eradicating global poverty, jars. He posits similar solutions to contain global warming, all the while crystal-gazing from an available