Sachs’ role as an advocate of western “shock therapy” in Bolivia and the former Soviet Union also gets the Mishra treatment. Some criticisms are deserved. Sachs and numerous other apostles of the Washington consensus were too ready to presume the Anglo-American version of capitalism could (and should) take root in different soil. We know now that selling off lucrative state assets in a post-autocratic fire sale is the road to oligarchy. I suspect Sachs is wiser about the shortfalls of neoliberalism today. He no longer even prescribes the Washington consensus for America. He should be complimented for changing his mind.

His latest book, The Ages of Globalization, is a magisterial chronicle of globalization in seven stages from the paleolithic age to the digital. The further back you look, the clearer the key trends of history become. Global integration is the human story, both good and bad. Medicine is one facet. Covid-19 is another. We cannot stop the shrinking of the world. We can only try to shape it. It goes without saying that humanity must avoid the bottomless pit of mutually recriminating nationalisms.

The Ages of Globalization concludes with an interesting, if quixotic, set of recommendations for global reform. Sachs’ premise is that our species is eminently capable of reason. He also approvingly quotes EO Wilson, the American evolutionary biologist, who said that we have stumbled into the 21st century with “Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology.” That seems like a more apt summary of where we are today.