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One of the world's greatest economists and the author of the New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty offers an urgently needed assessment of the environmental degradation, rapid population growth, and extreme poverty that threaten global peace and prosperity. Common Wealth provides a set of practical solutions based on a new economic paradigm for our crowded planet.
In Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs shows us that we need a new economic paradigmùglobal, inclusive, cooperative, environmentally aware, and science basedùbecause we are running up against the realities of a crowded planet. The alternative is a series of cascading threats to global well-being, all of which are solvable but potentially disastrous if left unattended. Prosperity must be maintained through new strategies for sustainable development that complement market forces, spread sustainable technologies, stabilize the global population, and enable the billion poorest people to escape from the trap of extreme poverty. The seemingly "soft issues" of the environment, public health, population growth, and extreme poverty will become the hard issues of geopolitics in coming years. Indeed, these issues will become key determinants of war and peace.
The very idea of nations that scramble for global power, natural resources, and international markets is passT, and must be replaced by a new era of global cooperation around shared goals of sustainable development. Though we live in a time when confidence in global cooperation is at a low ebb, experience teaches us that it has repeatedly succeeded in the past. Now the capacity to deliver sustainable prosperity to all is greater than ever before if governments, businesses, and civil societies throughout the world coalesce around the goals that humanity adopted at the start of the new millennium, goals that Jeffrey Sachs calls our Millennium Promises.
If we take the right measures, there will be room for all on the planet to live in peace and prosperity. We can achieve the four key goals of our global society: environmental sustainability (including a solution to climate change), the stabilization of the world's population, the end of extreme poverty, and a new era of global cooperation to solve common problems. These are not utopian goals, but they won't be reached on our current trajectory and with our current economic thinking. Common Wealth points the way to the global course correction we must embrace for the sake of our common future.
