Wadler's Blog

Taking his lead from John Kennedy's precept 'Peace is a Process', in the 2007 Reith Lectures, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, lays out a system of initiatives that government, institutions, and citizens can follow to achieve peace, limit climate change, and reduce economic inequality. In the last lecture, he claims a special place for scientists to organize to solve the world's ills, and cites Wikipedia and Linux as a model---a sort of Open Source government. Heady stuff; it's not often one encounters this scope of vision. The lectures are delivered from London, Beijing, New York, and (for the finale) Edinburgh, home of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment.