Sachs invoked President John F. Kennedy's words to push back against what he called the greatest obstacle to progress: widespread pessimism and a lack of faith in humanity. After cataloguing the staggering waste in American society — military spending in Afghanistan at ten times the country's national income, crime costing ten percent of GDP while early-childhood education was denied a fraction of that, billions spent cleaning up oil spills while rejecting small investments in renewable energy — Sachs argued that much of the explanation wasn't poor organization or even greed, but a deep-seated belief that humanity can't do better. Kennedy's words cut through that fatalism. Of course we can do better, Sachs insisted, and the graduates' education at Connecticut College had given them the skills and the responsibility to prove it.