Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Sachs

Sachs is smuggling a moral argument into the plumbing of macroeconomics: the problem with global finance isn’t simply that money moves too freely, it’s that it moves on the wrong clock. By pointing to the early 1990s - the high tide of post-Cold War liberalization, when “opening up” was treated like a synonym for modernization - he frames developing countries as newly plugged into a system whose incentives were never designed for their needs.

The key phrase is “very good long-term projects,” which sounds like praise but also functions as indictment. He’s implicitly defending governments that borrowed or attracted capital for infrastructure, education, basic utilities: investments that raise productivity slowly and broadly rather than quickly and visibly. Those are politically and economically rational choices for development, yet they collide with international capital’s demand for liquidity, fast returns, and easy exit. The subtext is a mismatch between patient nation-building and impatient markets.

His time horizon - “five or 10 or 20 years” - is doing rhetorical work. It reminds you that development is not a quarterly earnings report, and it quietly calls out the fragility of countries forced to refinance long before benefits materialize. Read against the backdrop of the 1994 Mexican crisis and the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the line lands as a critique of hot money: sudden inflows that look like confidence until they reverse and become catastrophe.

Sachs’s intent isn’t to romanticize state planning or demonize globalization outright; it’s to argue that the architecture of finance should fit the development task. If capital can’t tolerate a long payoff, it will punish exactly the investments that make countries stable enough to be “safe bets” later.