Politics & Power Quote by Jeffrey Sachs

A bureaucratic horror story hides inside Sachs's plain-spoken complaint: the problem isn't just that the U.S. isn't doing enough on development; it's that the state lacks the basic muscle memory to even know what "enough" would look like. The first sentence lands like an audit finding delivered with a smirk you can almost hear. "Counted on one hand" isn't only scarcity, it's fragility: a multitrillion-dollar government with a talent pool so thin it borders on symbolic.

Sachs is aiming at a specific failure mode of superpowers: confusing money, intent, and capability. Treasury is where global economic power gets translated into policy. If the people who actually understand development finance are vanishingly few, then big promises (to reduce poverty, stabilize countries, address climate-linked fragility) become press releases untethered from implementation. The subtext is brutal: this isn't hypocrisy, it's incompetence at the level of institutional design. Leaders can't feel the gap between commitments and action if they don't possess the vocabulary of action - the staffing, the technical know-how, the interagency plumbing, the metrics that make promises legible.

Context matters. Sachs, a high-profile development economist who has lived in the machinery of global aid and debt policy, is criticizing Washington's habit of treating development as a moral posture or a geopolitical side quest rather than a disciplined craft. It's also a quiet indictment of a post-Cold War and post-9/11 policy ecosystem that staffed up for finance, sanctions, and security while hollowing out expertise in long-term state-building and poverty reduction. The sting is that ignorance becomes a kind of insulation: if no one in charge can operationalize the promise, failure doesn't even register as failure.