Common Wealth by Jeffrey Sachs

With only having read the first two chapters of Jeffrey D. Sach’s book, Common Wealth, I’ve come to greatly appreciate and admire his impetus for writing. That is, his desire to first inform and educate the world of it’s impending need for global cooperation in dealing with looming issues at hand such as population growth, world poverty, arms race, etc. If such issues are not dealt with relatively soon, they may prove to be the very cause of irreversibly crippling and destroying our planet, as science would seem to suggest! Interestingly, as Sasch notes, “The main problem, I shall suggest time and again, is not the absence of reasonable and low-cost solutions, but the difficulty of implementing global cooperation to put those solutions in place” (12). Though I try to not be a cynic of other people’s optimism, I cannot help but feel that it would seem enormously easier to solve many such problems if the issues at stake were finances and not cooperation. I hold very little confidence in governments and other groups to be able to agreeably resolve these issues; at least not in the time frame necessary. Of course, nothing has proven to be more effective in uniting people together towards a common purpose than a crisis. Maybe that will have to be necessary element, now missing, to help people join forces. However, the ominous question, of course, is whether it will be too late by then…