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Title details for The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey D. Sachs - Available

The Price of Civilization

Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity

by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Richard McGonagle
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
For more than three decades, Jeffrey D. Sachs has been at the forefront of international economic problem solving.  But Sachs turns his attention back home in The Price of Civilization, a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity.
As he has done in dozens of countries around the world in the midst of economic crises, Sachs turns his unique diagnostic skills to what ails the American economy. He finds that both political parties—and many leading economists—have missed the big picture, offering shortsighted solutions such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to address complex economic problems that require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that we have profoundly underestimated globalization’s long-term effects on our country, which create deep and largely unmet challenges with regard to jobs, incomes, poverty, and the environment. America’s single biggest economic failure, Sachs argues, is its inability to come to grips with the new global economic realities.
Yet Sachs goes deeper than an economic diagnosis. By taking a broad, holistic approach—looking at domestic politics, geopolitics, social psychology, and the natural environment as well—Sachs reveals the larger fissures underlying our country’s current crisis. He shows how Washington has consistently failed to address America’s economic needs. He describes a political system that has lost its ethical moorings, in which ever-rising campaign contributions and lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the citizenry. He also looks at the crisis in our culture, in which an overstimulated and consumption-driven populace in a ferocious quest for wealth now suffers shortfalls of social trust, honesty, and compassion.
Finally, Sachs offers a plan to turn the crisis around. He argues persuasively that the problem is not America’s abiding values, which remain generous and pragmatic, but the ease with which political spin and consumerism run circles around those values. He bids the reader to reclaim the virtues of good citizenship and mindfulness toward the economy and one another. Most important, he bids each of us to accept the price of civilization, so that together we can restore America to its great promise.  
The Price of Civilization is a masterly road map for prosperity, founded on America’s deepest values and on a rigorous understanding of the twenty-first-century world economy.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 4, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307913067
      • File size: 280509 KB
      • Duration: 09:44:23

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The author of THE END OF POVERTY and COMMON WEALTH offers another another blockbuster philosophical treatise. Whether one agrees with him or not, this book provokes the listener into thinking about how and why we got where we are and how to get out of the societal and global jams we're in. Narrator Richard McGonagle grabs our preconceptions about the world and twists them, possibly irrevocably, as he delivers the text. McGonagle's excellent pacing overcomes the sometimes tedious nature of the details that are a necessary part of the work. His use of vocal inflection brings this simple, direct narrative almost to the level of a fully voiced listening experience. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 29, 2011
      Best known for advising postcommunist and impoverished countries on development strategies, economist Sachs (Common Wealth) takes on the cesspool of debt, backwardness, and corruption that is the United States in this hard-hitting brief for a humane economy. Sachs surveys an America where the rich get richer and the rest grow poorer, less secure, and less prepared for a modern economy; where a fixation by both parties on cutting taxes and coddling corporate donorsâSachs issues stinging rebukes of Obama's policiesâcreates insupportable federal deficits and stymies critical reforms and spending programs; and where an electorate stupefied by mass media and advertising ignores its better instincts and pursues a mindless consumerism. The author's straightforward exposition, buttressed by a wealth of revealing tables and charts, sharply rebuts reigning free market orthodoxies and makes a compelling case for an activist state that redistributes wealth and makes life fairer and more productive for everyone. Sachs's remedies are less focused than his critique, and his pinning of all hope on the 15- to 29-year-old "Millennial Generation," aka "the children of the Internet," feels naïve and ageist. Still, his stimulating, staunchly progressive take on America's dysfunctions is a must-read for every concerned citizen.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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