Jeffrey Sachs: belief

Transcript context

…This story, it really fits your model of change. That’s why, reading the book, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head. For me, it also went off in my head as I learned more about this, which is that Kennedy and Khrushchev stumbled into nearly the end of the world in October of 1962, and Kennedy made his share of terrible mistakes. Our USG, which I’m usually not too much of a fan of, made its share of terrible mistakes, whether it’s Bay of Pigs or other things. One by one, we stumbled — not to the desire of either of these leaders — to the point where we were within the hair’s breadth of total annihilation. So many stupid things happen in this world, as almost happened again. Some pilot gets lost over Alaska and flies over the Soviet Union, or Russian local commanders in Cuba have the power to fire nuclear weapons. We’re so close to the edge. The Cuban missile crisis is defused I think with real humanity by Kennedy, and by Khrushchev. Then they both basically reached the intuition, “This is insane, the way we’re acting. This is crazy.” They find a way to reach an agreement next year. It’s an agreement in which typically the right on both sides that they face, or the hard-liners, the nationalists on both sides, say, “You can’t agree with each other!” and they find a way to reach an agreement. So to me, it is a paradigm of how we can stay alive in this world and actually get somewhere. If I thought more problems were of an evolutionary nature, had very large numbers of players, didn’t have clear channels of communications, didn’t have elite advisors, but were more of just a big, messy splat. Should I then be more pessimistic about differential diagnostics? Or do you think that as a model of social change still is going to hold?…

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