God I wish I were Jeffrey Sachs. Things are so simple for that guy. In his world literally any problem is solvable so long as you throw enough brains and cash at it–Sub-Saharan Africa? Send in a few million mosquito nets, John Legend and a small army of Sustainable Development grad students and your, err their problems are solved. Darfur? Reverse desertification, keep the cattle alive and change will come from the bottom up–never mind that the deliberate underdevelopment of Darfur is the direct result of the current regime’s policy towards the region, or that real Africanists like Alex de Waal insist that “famine” in Sudan is, in fact, a verb, and not the result of environmental degradation alone. The Sachsian fantasy that sustainable development is some kind of magic bullet for the Darfur conflict is as dangerous as it is absurd–indeed, denying that Darfur is a political conflict with political solutions is as closed-minded (and opportunistic) as denying that environmental factors have had major political consequences in the Sahel. 

Today’s visit to the Utopian technocracy that only a strict diet of Sachsian economics can help us realize appears on the op/ed page of the Washington Post. It comes in the form a pretty solid take on the auto bailout–it’s true that the government probably shouldn’t let the Big 3 go under, just as it’s true that any “bailout” has to come in the form of a basic restructuring of the domestic auto industry. He doesn’t specifically say that a bailout should be conditional on a mandated increase in efficiency standards over the next 15-20 years–indeed, he’s torn between wanting the government to prod the industry in a more responsible direction and wanting it to go easy on ‘em:

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On the page today, Olivia Rosane chides John McCain for what little he has to say about student loan reform:

In addition, McCain only addresses the issue of college loans by vowing to make sure they are accessible. With two-thirds of students graduating in debt, accessibility to college loans isn’t the issue.

This is a legitimate point, although Rosane only alludes to why: one of the causes of the current financial mess was the absurd accessibility of loans that people simply couldn’t pay back. But because the economy depends so much upon a functioning private credit system, accessibility has to be tempered by certain internal and external checks against rampant, even irrational lending: checks like market regulation, sensible interest rates, consumer restraint, saving, etc. Accessibility is a great idea, but with micro-level financial decision-making resulting in macro-level chaos, the question is what kind of accessibility we actually want.

McCain hasn’t really addressed this yet. Indeed, his stance on the subsidized, “guaranteed” student loan system is all but unknown a little over a week before the election. But we know Obama’s position. And it is worrisome indeed.

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On Monday night the two top economic advisers for Obama-Biden ’08 and McCain-Palin ’08, Austan Goolsbee and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, respectively, met in Roone Arledge Auditorium to debate the economic issues that are so prominent in the minds of voters. The moderators were four Columbia faculty members, each with various levels of economic expertise (Richard Clarida, Janet Currie, Joseph Stiglitz, and Michael Woodford). It was hard to predict what would happen—would the event consist of dull, roundabout conversation, too much economic jargon, a reenactment of the presidential debates? Fortunately, the debate was surprisingly entertaining. The line of argumentation was more direct and focused than what we got in the presidential debates. The questions from the faculty members and audience were specific and pointed at particular policy issues of each campaign. Moreover, the differences between the Republican and Democratic plans could not have been more obvious.

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