Jeffrey Sachs

I'm hoping we're not in the end times.

This is the basic point.

We should have some prudence.

Somebody should reach the president of the United States and say, stop before disaster.

No.

I've studied history now for my whole life and I've seen disasters.

I've studied intensively disasters and near misses and avoided disasters with care.

I wrote a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath.

I've studied World War I and World War II upside down, right side up, from every country's perspective.

I've spent half a century looking at this.

Terrible things happen because individual leaders and governments make miscalculations.

They don't talk to each other.

They don't understand the ramifications.

They have a breakdown of

uh systematic processes um so i don't think that this is ordained but i think we're close to overload right now which is what you see happening around crises often what does that mean overload it it means that um very

consequent decisions need to be made skillfully and the decisions are a big deal they have a very very large consequence i i would call them non-linearities meaning it's uh that that the consequence of the choice can take us into a disaster or into uh

into solution.

So in other words, these are really big choices.

And the truth is individuals make a big difference at times like this.

What we've seen, what I've tried to understand, you know better than I do, but I'm trying to understand the decision process in the US government right now.