Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, January 08, 2021 The Truth About Trump’s Mob The storming of the US Capitol on January 6 is easily misunderstood. Shaken by the ordeal, members of Congress have issued statements explaining that America is a nation of laws, not mobs. The implication is that the disruption incited by President Donald Trump is something new. It is not. The... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, January 06, 2021 Five Reasons for Optimism in 2021 The year 2020 was a harrowing one, with the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide economic reversals, widespread climate-related disasters, pervasive social unrest, and even US President Donald Trump’s phony claims about massive electoral fraud and calls among his backers for martial law. Yet, despite the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 24, 2020 The Ugly Part of the $900 Billion Stimulus Bill The new Covid-19 stimulus package will be a great relief for tens of millions of Americans, but the process of getting to it exposed the need to overhaul our broken budget politics. Both parties have been at fault in creating a process that is chaotic, undemocratic and ultimately reckless. The late... Read more |
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Views Sunday, November 29, 2020 Supreme Court's Scientifically Illiterate Decision Will Cost Lives Last month, I wrote that Amy Coney Barrett would help to usher in a new post-truth jurisprudence on the Supreme Court. While I had cited her anti-science statements on climate change, her arrival on the court has created a new 5-4 majority against public-health science at the height of the Covid-19... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, August 05, 2020 Beware Biblical Literalists Like Pompeo Seeking War With China Many white Christian evangelicals in the United States have long believed that America has a God-given mission to save the world. Under the influence of this crusading mentality, US foreign policy has often swerved from diplomacy to war. It is in danger of doing so again. Last month, Secretary of... Read more |
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Views Sunday, May 03, 2020 What Asian Nations Know About Squashing Covid The number of Americans who have died from Covid-19 now significantly exceeds the total US troop fatalities during the Vietnam War . While the coronavirus continues to ravage the country, with confirmed cases exceeding 1 million and deaths rising by the day, some states are lifting stay at home... Read more |
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Views Monday, April 13, 2020 Why the US Has the World's Highest Number of Covid-19 Deaths The US now has the world's highest number of deaths from Covid-19 , with at least 21,692 losing their lives to the virus as of Sunday afternoon. Americans will continue to die in large numbers until our country mounts a coherent response to the epidemic. President Donald Trump has failed. The US... Read more |
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Views Friday, April 03, 2020 How US Can Keep Death Toll Far Below the 100,000 Projection On Tuesday, the White House projected an alarming possibility: Between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could die from the Covid-19 pandemic , despite the efforts in place to minimize the spread of the disease. Yet these 100,000 to 240,000 deaths are not inevitable. Far from it. As of Thursday night... Read more |
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Views Friday, March 27, 2020 Why America Has the World's Most Confirmed Covid-19 Cases On Thursday, we hit a grim watershed. The US overtook Italy and China as the country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases. This is a dire crisis and an extraordinary failure of President Donald Trump. Americans are suffering and dying because the Trump administration failed to act... Read more |
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Views Monday, March 23, 2020 Global Cooperation and a National Lockdown: Our Best Hope for Fighting Coronavirus Covid-19 is a pandemic of remarkable ferocity. The global population lacks immunity because this is the first time in known history that we are confronting this coronavirus. The virus is also highly transmissible. To add to the problem, many people who have been infected experience mild, if any... Read more |