Dominic Lawson: Jeffrey Sachs is wrong once again: rising population isn't going to destroy the planet

The BBC's Reith Lectures are not known for their humorous content, but the opening words of the 2007 series had me rocking with laughter. Professor Jeffrey D Sachs told his audience that "It is with profound humility that I speak to you". Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many positive attributes, but humility is certainly not one of them.

This can be seen in his new book, The End of Poverty, which might well have been subtitled "My plan to save the world". It has an introduction by Bono, which, as one reviewer pointed out, is appropriate: the economist as rock star meets the rock star as economist. Such an alliance must surely have titillated the BBC. I suppose it will also have been aware of MTV's series The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr Jeffrey Sachs in Africa. Alas, Angelina was not among Sachs' audience at the Royal Society, an audience he described (with all humility) as "a unique gathering of leaders of action and thought" - but Geri Halliwell showed up, which was nice.

So Professor Sachs is cool. This is a relatively new phenomenon for the man described by himself as "internationally renowned for his work as an economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa". He is indeed renowned for all that, but not, it must be said, universally admired for it. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe he and a handful of other Harvard economists introduced so-called "shock therapy", characterised chiefly by instant and massive privatisation and the simultaneous removal of all price controls.

In Russia this was hardly a great success, and not just because of the traumatic consequences in the short term. Sachs insists that Yeltsin, rather than his American advisors, was responsible for the fact that the privatisation policy amounted in practice to the theft by a handful of favoured apparatchiks of the industries previously ran - in its own inimitably corrupt fashion - by the state. The former World Bank economist David Ellerman counters that it was the rapidity of the privatisation which made such an outcome inevitable, declaring that "Only the mixture of American triumphalism and academic arrogance could have produced such a lethal dose of gall."

Not surprisingly, those on the left with long memories are somewhat cynical about Sachs' new plans to solve poverty in Africa, although they warmly endorse his appeal to America to devote more money to international aid and less to international warfare: "I hope he gets what he wants, but that he doesn't get any credit for it", commented David Ellerman, in a somewhat sour jibe at Sachs' elemental ego.

In one respect there is a consistency between Sachs' Russian debacle and what he now demands for Africa. He wanted the US to provide much more in aid to the new Russia, and was openly critical when it failed to come up with the sums he thought necessary. It seems incredible to me that such an intelligent man couldn't see that the same corrupt elites who stole entire industries would appropriate aid dollars with exactly the same attention to detail.

His main academic critic in the US, Professor William Easterly of New York University, is similarly dismissive of Sachs' view that the solution to Africa's problems lies principally in an enormous expansion of aid budgets. Easterly, a former development economist at the World Bank, is the author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, cataloguing the corrupt practices which have ensured that almost two-and-a-half trillion dollars of aid have achieved nothing but economic stagnation in Africa.

Sachs' retort is that the aid had been spent in the wrong way - and, of course, he knows the right way. Even supposing that he does, there is still the matter of transmitting the money. Perhaps because Sachs is now a special advisor to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, he proposes that this task be allocated to various UN agencies. These, I take it, would be the same bureaucratic geniuses who managed the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme.

This is not an argument for ignoring the wretched of the world: Sachs is obviously right that we have a moral duty to do the best that we can, but that will involve learning from those countries which have transformed their prospects over the past quarter century. In Fighting the Diseases of Poverty (International PolicyPress) Indur Goklany points out that, while Sub-Saharan Africa has a higher food supply per capita than it did 25 years ago, its growth in that most basic measurement of individual well-being has been vastly outstripped by China. The world's most populous nation has achieved this by the same means which brought prosperity to the developed world: industrialisation. Aid had nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, however, Professor Sachs seems to subscribe to the fashionable view that this is a bad thing because it is killing the planet. In his first Reith lecture, he denounced something called "The anthropocy, in Beijing, which soon will be the country (sic) that is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet". He linked this to the claim that we - the anthropocy, presumably - are "over-hunting, over-fishing and over-gathering just about anything that grows slowly or moves slowly".

The Malthusian myth is an unconscionable time a-dying. Sachs' first lecture was entitled "Bursting at the seams". Yet humanity has consistently demonstrated that there is no causal link between population growth and increasing poverty. Our numbers are higher than they have ever been - and the average member of our species has never been further from starvation. As Indur Goklany points out, "Since 1950 the global population has increased by 150 per cent, but at the same time the real price of food commodities has declined 75 per cent... average daily food supplies per person in developing countries increased by 38 per cent."

Yet on BBC's Newsnight the same day as Sachs' lecture, the Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, declared that it was impossible for the rest of humanity to aspire to the level of consumption that we currently enjoy: "If the world were to have the same living standards as we have in the UK, then we'd need three planets to support us." In the studio the environment spokesmen of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats nodded sagely.

Possibly Jeffrey Sachs and David Miliband are right that the planet is doomed if we carry on as we are. Yet for 200 years since Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, economists and politicians have continued to make fools of themselves by writing books and delivering lectures prophesying famines and planetary apocalypse, unless we take their advice. It's one way to make a living, I suppose.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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