Deep in Jeffrey Sachs’ The Price of Civilization, after some 250 pages, comes a tragic irony. “Yes,” Sachs writes, “the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less, of it.”

Out of context, it’s a howler. But Sachs, a professor of health policy and management and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, has written a fact-filled, chart-laden paean to the hope and can-do spirit of America. Not so long ago, he writes, the government wasn’t corrupt and incompetent. We planned, then carried through. We spent more to solve the problems of poverty, and we taxed the rich more to pay for it. Those taxes are “the price we pay for civilization,” in Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ memorable phrase. This used to be consensus.

Then Ronald Reagan came along and, with plenty of help from well-heeled ideologues, the idea that “government is the problem” took root and crowded out the flowers of civil society. Each failure—of privatized government services, of high-stakes testing in grammar schools, of “trickle down” economics, and of basically every other project of what used to be called the New Right—was held up as proof of the proposition that everything government touches turns to crap. This, in turn, begat even more rabid adherence to the ideology, and drives for yet deeper cuts to welfare and taxes on the rich.

Sachs promises to illuminate a path out of this feedback loop. But the liberal reader searches in vain for the surefire solution, the political program, the strategy, that can lead American politics out of its self-reinforcing stupidity.

And perhaps it’s too much to ask that Sachs deliver on his promise. He’s a macroeconomist, not a political fixer. So the book becomes less a stirring call to arms or a strategic plan than a dense compilation of facts that matter—and that have been all but erased from the public debate. Consider:

Three million U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between 1998 and 2004.

Google uses a tax dodge called the “Double Irish” to avoid taxes on billions of dollars of revenue.

Since 1980, the average compensation of the top 100 U.S. CEOs increased from 50 times the average worker’s salary to more than 700 times.

One could use the book to fight the nonsense declaimed by so-called “conservatives,” but they do not respect logic or facts. In a review for The Wall Street Journal, Paul Ryan, Republican congressman from Wisconsin and proud Ayn Rand acolyte, predictably trashed the book, but tellingly contrasted Sachs’ moral concerns with the maintenance of what Ryan described as “an economy that has unleashed unparalleled prosperity.”

> Email Edward Ericson Jr.