Our Situation: The Poor, The Excluded, The Future
Here is a very interesting talk presented by economist Jeffery Sachs – on the poor, the excluded, and the future. Given our upcoming election I believe a talk of this nature would help the average citizen understand important global issues. (Click here to skip the intro and articles and watch the full speech at Harvard )
Article Introduction (Via the Situationist)
On September 11, 2008, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs spoke to a packed hall at Harvard Law School in an address entitled “Representing the Voiceless: The Poor, The Excluded, and the Future.”
My main message to you is whatever they might do in teaching you in the next three years, don’t let anybody beat out of you the enthusiasm for seeing law as a instrument of social change, and as a mechanism for solving human problems. That I think is the most important role that we need to play in the coming years, and I believe, as I’ll emphasize, that places like Harvard have unique responsibilities that are not being fulfilled right now, and because of that are putting us at unnecessary risk.
Article Excerpts (Via The Situationist)
“This world’s in a lot of trouble — despite and, ironically in part, because of our wealth and technical capacity. The world is not reliably running on the rails, or running on the fiber optic cables right now. The world is at an unusually high risk of spinning out of control. And I think it’s our greatest challenge to try to help insure that that doesn’t happen.”
“Why am I worried? I’m worried because I think that the world is in a very dangerous, unprecedented and poorly understood situation due to two concepts. First, is crowding and that’s a term which for me means a number of things which I’ll explain, but it basically means a world that is not coming to grips with it’s interconnectedness, it’s diversity, and the pressure’s on the weakest and the most vulnerable in the planet which include more than one billion people.
“The other big risk is that humankind, has taken over the earth’s physical systems in ways that we barely understand, but which are a profound threat for survival even. And he should know because it was only by accident that while looking a possible implications of supersonic transport technologies in the early 1970s,”
Background On Jeffery Sachs (Via wikipedia)
Jeffery Sachs is an American economist and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s School of Public Health. Additionally, he is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and the founder and co-President of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger.
Click here to read the article review part 1
Click here to read the article review part 2
