Jeffrey Sachs on what it's going to take

NY Times review of books yesterday published this review of Jeffrey Sach's new book, Common Wealth.

Sachs is a very smart economist at Colombia University. From the review, it appears he argues that we are likely to find ourselves, as a species and as a global civilization, in serious trouble, if we don't turn it around. This much is not news, and Sachs lays out steps to get us on a new track.

The reviewer's central critique is striking: Sachs doesn't adequately address the "psycological and political" terrain of the solutions needed. I get from the review that "psycological" means "human condition", all the "fear, neurosis and desire" of humanity that inhibits our capacities for "rational, commonsensical" behavior -- and that we all know can mess up even the best laid plans.

Sachs is an impressive thinker, and certainly understands all this obvious stuff. I'm not critiquing him. Instead I'm just pointing to something just as obvious -- for humanity to flourish beyond the four historically unprecidented and deadly serious challenges that Sachs identifies (population, food production, climate change, and anachronistic institutions), we are going to have to evolve not materially, but at the level of consciousness.

The challenge of our times is not to create a better widget to feed more people (though we need to do this), but a new understanding of what it means to be a human being.