Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

“Don’t Know, Should Care,” by Jeffrey D. Sachs, New York Times, 5 June, p. A25.

Jeffrey Sachs basically takes the U.S. intelligence community to task for knowing almost nothing about the Gap. He’s absolutely right.

His main beef is that U.S. development programs for the Gap have been progressively “gutted” going all the way back to the early Reagan years (very true) “to the point that there is little institutional understanding about societies seething because of mass unemployment, rapid population growth, pervasive disease and chronic disease.”

What he’s basically saying is that not only does the intell community lack such knowledge, the whole US Government is badly understaffed in terms of such understanding, and I think he’s right. Wherever he looks throughout the USG, “I see woefully few individuals with expertise about the low-income world. This is too bad, because the low-income world (roughly, those who live and die on less than $2 per day) constitutes 40 percent of humanity—and most of the places where American troops have fought and died in recent decades.”

Mark Warren, my personal editor on PNM and my two articles for Esquire, recently edited Sachs’ piece for his magazine. When he was done with the piece, he told me that Sachs and I share a world view that is amazingly coincidental, in his opinion. I was a bit surprised by Mark’s judgment, but after reading this piece, I’m beginning to understand his point.

Sachs’ op-ed ends with:

“We must have leaders who recognize that the problems of the poor aren’t trifles to leave to do-gooders, but are vital strategic issues. For the first time in decades, we must strive to understand problems—tropical disease, malnutrition and the like—that are unfamiliar to us but are urgent concerns of billions of people abroad. In the case of a superpower, ignorance is not bliss; it is a threat to Americans and to humanity.”