Published: May 23,2023
By staff writer
At the Athens Democracy Forum in October last year, American economist and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Professor Jeffrey Sachs said that, “ Chinese official are the best informed professionals I know in the world.” He further spoke of the way Chinese officials believe in professional excellence of a centralized administrative state and that political culture more than 2000 years old.
Talking about his own country, Professor Sachs described the US governance culture as: “A semi-democratic white-dominated hierarchical racist society that aims to preserve privilege by the elites [and founded as] a slave-owning genocidal country” killing Native Americans. Before Professor Sachs was cut off by the moderator, he demystified the myth that “democracies” are more peaceful and told the gathering that the most violent country in the world since 1950s has been the United States.
Commenting on the attitude of Washington Administration, Jeffrey Sachs said that, “the single biggest mistake of President Biden is to say the great struggle of world is between democracies and autocracies.” Instead Sachs said that the real problem of the world is to live together overcome our common crises of environment and inequality. Different societies have very deep rooted political cultures that do not rank on an easy scale that this is the best or this is the worst. “The solutions in a world of different narratives is to speak with each other more. We in the Unites States our political elites do not speak with Chinese political elites except to point fingers or to yell at them or to do other things,” Sachs said.