FLATWIRE: Jeffrey Sachs tallies up the price of civilization (Richard McGill Murphy)

Oct. 14, 2011 (Fortune) -- Once upon a time our leaders were honest and brave, and the Republic flourished. But nowadays the virtues of the founding fathers have given way to corruption. The Republic is experiencing political and economic turmoil. Some even argue that it has entered terminal decline and will soon be supplanted by upstart rivals from the East. If they wish to avoid this dark fate, the citizens of the Republic must rediscover their ancient virtue.

Jeffrey Sachs didn't invent this line of argument -- credit for that goes to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), the grumpy statesman and orator who witnessed the last days of the Roman Republic and its transition to an imperium under Julius Caesar. But Sachs reprises it to good effect in his latest book, The Price of Civilization. Sachs began his career as a globetrotting macroeconomist who helped Russia and several of its former satellites manage their variously bumpy transitions from communism to the market system. He later shifted his attention to poverty in the developing world, publishing bestsellers like The End of Poverty, in which he argued that extreme poverty could be eradicated in our lifetimes by substantial doses of foreign aid directed to medical, agricultural, and educational reform, along with microcredit and other financial innovations. Nowadays he runs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on sustainable development and healthcare policy. And he still travels the world, delivering advice about globalization and development to everyone from Bono to U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon.

In his new book, Sachs turns his agile mind on the U.S. and finds a big fat mess -- literally. In Sachs' telling, Americans have grown obese, ignorant, and apathetic. Our schools are collapsing, our infrastructure is crumbling, our great companies are selfish and predatory. Our politicians have been thoroughly corrupted by power and money and live mainly to serve the interests of their wealthy patrons. Plus, we watch way too much TV. "America has developed the world's most competitive market society but has squandered its civic virtue along the way," he writes. "Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery."

While Joe and Jane Citizen take their share of blame for America's ills, Sachs focuses most of his ire on our leaders and on the super-wealthy corporations and plutocrats who allegedly pull their strings. It's a bit odd to see a pointy-headed, Davos-frequenting technocrat like Sachs finding common cause with the Tea Party on one hand and the Wall Street protesters on the other, but there it is: This card-carrying member of the international elite clearly shares the anti-elitist anger that has become so prominent a feature of our public discourse in recent years.

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