Review of JeffRey Sachs’s book on what went wrong in the US
Convinced they had the formula, US economists, including Jeffrey Sachs, told other countries in the 1990s how to manage their economies. Sachs advised Russia to open up its economy to the market with a Big Bang. India’s economic policies have also been strongly influenced by US economics’ triumphalism during these years. Now US economists are turning inwards, wondering what went wrong at home. Therefore Sachs’s The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics after the Fall, though focussed entirely on what went wrong in the US, has lessons for us too. Indeed, reading his analysis, one gets a whiff of ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’.
(This story appears in the 03 February, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)