Your review of Jeffrey Sachs’s Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (London: Penguin, 2008) is right on the money: “If everyone in the world were as reasonable as Mr. Sachs, his solutions would be easy to implement. However, if everyone were that reasonable, there would not be so many problems in the first place” (“Sachs Appeal,” March 29, 2008). And, you could have pointed out, there would be no need for Mr. Sachs, either. He concocts his books as though he, and he alone, is playing a vast simulation game of the real world: tweak this, cut that, add a little over yonder, and there you have it! At beast, he shows that world peace and prosperity are logically possible. Luckily for him, this claim is beyond verification. At worst, he shows that the world out there is not a simulation game. Luckily for us, no-one in his right mind would ever let him play it for real. If he is a model of the modern intellectual, as you argue in your opening paragraph, the above sums up the useless beast pretty well.