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One of the world's most brilliant economists and the bestselling author of The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs has written a book that is essential reading for everyone - politicians, people in business and industry, and you. Setting out a bold and provocative, yet responsible and achievable, plan, The Price of Civilization reveals why we must - and how we can - change our entire economic culture in this time of crisis.
The world economy remains in a precarious state after the recent global recession - where quick fixes were implemented instead of sustainable solutions to systemic problems. Jeffrey Sachs argues powerfully for a new co-operative, common-sense political economy, one that stresses practical partnership between government and the private sector, demands competence in both arenas and occasionally insists on carefully chosen public and private sacrifices. In this new era of global capitalism, Sachs believes that we have to forget partisanship and solve these enormous problems together, clinically and holistically, just as one would approach the eradication of a disease.
The Price of Civilization explains how government can be made to reform corporate culture by fairly policing compensation but not stifling competition and forced to improve our energy infrastructure by both taxing emissions and providing market incentives for innovation. Sachs shows how government, business and citizens can find common ground - on bank accountability, the decentralising of social services and taxing the super-rich - as a way to achieve our shared goals of efficiency, equity and sustainability.
Sparing no-one but potentially benefiting us all, The Price of Civilization is a masterful roadmap, a programme designed to bridge seemingly impossible divides in our society and a way forward that we - and our leaders - ignore at our peril.

The latest in a spate of books provoked by the world economic crisis and one of the best (Guardian )

The economic critique stands on its own merits (The Times )

Scholarly, original, independent, rigorous, enlightened and enlightening...Sachs goes so far to restore one's wavering faith in the informing inspiration of the post-1945 new dawn, faith in economics... and faith in humanity (Spectator )

Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey David Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.

In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University.