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Jeffrey Sachs

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Jeffrey David Sachs (born November 5, 1954 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American economist known for his work as an economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa. He is currently a professor at Columbia University. He proposed shock therapy (though he himself hates the term) as a solution to the economic crises of Bolivia, Poland, and Russia. He is also known for his work with international agencies on problems of poverty reduction, debt cancellation, and disease control—especially HIV/AIDS, for the developing world.

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Biography

Sachs received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He holds honorary degrees from several institutions, including Simon Fraser University.

Before coming to Columbia University in July 2002, Sachs spent over 20 years at Harvard University. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in 1983, eventually becoming Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.

Since 2002, Sachs has been Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and a professor in Columbia's Department of Economics, School of International and Public Affairs and Department of Health Policy and Management; in 2003 he became Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development. He is also Director of the United Nations Millennium Project and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Previously, Sachs has been an advisor to the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Development Programme.

In his 2005 work, The End of Poverty, Sachs wrote that "Africa's governance is poor because Africa is poor." According to Sachs, with the right policies, mass destitution - like the 1.1 billion extremely poor living on less than $1 a day - can be eliminated within 20 years. China and India serve as examples; China has lifted 300m people out of poverty in the last two decades. For Sachs a key element is raising aid from the $65bn level of 2002 to $195bn a year by 2015. Sachs emphasises the role of geography, with much of Africa suffering from being landlocked and disease-prone, but stresses that these problems once recognised can be overcome: disease (such as malaria) can be controlled, and infrastructure created. Without specifically addressing these issues, political elites will continue to focus on getting resource-based wealth out of the country as fast as possible, and investment and development remain mirages.

Sachs claims he has developed a new branch of economics, called "clinical economics." His research interests include the links of health and development, economic geography, globalization, transitions to market economies, international financial markets, international macroeconomic policy coordination, emerging markets, economic development and growth, global competitiveness, and macroeconomic policies in developing and developed countries.

Sachs is married to Sonia Ehrlich Sachs and has three children, Lisa, Adam, and Hannah.

Criticism

While a hero to many, some economists also view Jeff Sachs’s proposals as dangerously naive. One of his strongest critics is New York University (NYU) Professor of Economics William Easterly who savaged End of Poverty in his [review] for the Washington Post. Easterly's 2006 book, White Man's Burden, is a more thorough rebuttal of Sachs's argument that poor countries are stuck in a "poverty trap" from which there is no escape, except by massively scaled-up foreign aid. Easterly presents statistical evidence that he says proves that many newly developed countries—indeed, most of them—attained their higher status without large amounts of foreign aid. This is especially damaging to Sachs's poverty trap thesis, which is the rationale for increasing foreign aid. Easterly and Sachs are said by colleagues not to be on speaking terms.

Another person to criticize Sachs is [Amir Attaran], who is a scientist and lawyer and currently the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development at the [University of Ottawa]. Sachs and Attaran have worked closely as colleagues, including to coauthor a famous [study] in The Lancet documenting the dearth of foreign aid money to fight HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, which led to the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, Sachs and Attaran part company in their opinion of the Millennium Development Goals, and Attaran argues in a [paper] published in PLoS Medicine and an [editorial] in the New York Times that the United Nations has misled by setting specific, but immeasurable, targets for the Millennium Development Goals (for example, to reduce maternal mortality or malaria). Sachs dismisses that view in a [reply] to PLoS Medicine by saying that only a handful of the Millennium Development Goals are immeasurable, but Attaran also [replies] citing the United Nations' own data analysis (which the UN subsequently [blocked] from public access) showing that progress on a very large majority of the Millennium Development Goals is never measured. Their ongoing [debate] on the web is one of the most fundamental in the future of international development.

Publications

Jeffrey Sachs writes a column in the monthly science magazine Scientific American called "Sustainable Developments," focusing on how the earth and its climate impact world politics. The first column was published in the June 2006 issue.

See also

External links

 

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