[Peace-discuss] Who is Jeffrey Sachs?

[David Green]

Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed this morning on NPR
about Bush's trip to Africa. Predictably, no context
regarding Sachs' background was provided (nor much
about our history in relation to Africa). Here is a
critical perspective, followed by one more "balanced"
which explains how he comes to his current role, and
why he is interviewed about Africa. God save us from
boy geniuses.

Who Is Jeffrey Sachs?
[newdemocracyworld.org]

Sachs is the director of the Center for International
Development and professor of international trade at
Harvard University. In 1990 Sachs was an economic
advisor to the government of Poland when he revealed
his plans for "helping" the working class, writing (
in the January 13 The Economist), "Western observers
should not over-dramatize lay-offs and bankruptcies.
Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, now has too
little unemployment, not too much."

Sachs served as the chief economic advisor to Russia's
President Boris Yeltsin from 1991 to 1994, where he
advocated "shock therapy" to create market capitalism
in Russia. Capitalism in Russia meant mines and
factories becoming the personal property of former
high ranking communists and other businessmen, while
employees went unpaid and starvation conditions
emerged for the first time since World War II. An
article in Harvard Magazine 1996 reported that
"Russians are dying at an unprecedented rate. Between
1990 and 1994 the country's death rate increased by 40
percent, from 11.2 to 15.7 deaths per 1,000 people.
Male life expectancy fell from 63.8 years to 57.7
years, and female life expectancy from 74.3 to 71.3
years. According to Elizabeth Brainerd, a graduate
student in economics, 'Declines in life expectancy of
this magnitude in only four years are unparalleled in
the twentieth century among countries at peace and in
the absence of major famines or epidemics.'"

John Spritzler
_________________

Adviser prefers practice in field to theory in class
 
NEW YORK Almost from the day he received tenure in the
Harvard economics department at the extraordinarily
young age of 28, Jeffrey Sachs has forged a reputation
as a professor who much prefers practicing and
preaching to theorizing. He brought that outlook with
him when he moved to Columbia University recently. The
Ivy League has never meant an ivory tower to him.
.
Besides running a research center with 1,000
employees, giving lectures and advising students, he
campaigns for medical aid to poor countries, helps the
secretary general of the United Nations with economic
development strategies and advises government leaders
on financial policies. Oh, yes - he also hangs out
with rock stars.
.
But some people who have followed his work closely say
they think that his real brilliance is in public
relations. His attempts to fix crises abroad and
influence policies for development have consistently
directed the attention of experts and lay people to
pressing economic problems. So by bringing Sachs on
board last summer, Columbia has guaranteed itself a
bigger voice - if a controversial one - on the world
stage.
.
"He appears to distance himself from things he's done
that are not perceived as success stories and cozy up
to those that were, after the fact, seen as
successful," said Janine Wedel, associate professor of
public policy at George Mason University in Arlington,
Virginia. She studied Sachs in action when he was
advising governments in Eastern Europe.
.
Moreover, Wedel said, it has not always been clear
whom he was representing at a given time - his own
consulting firm, Harvard, international financial
institutions, the United States or a local government.
Nor has it been clear where all of his financing has
come from or how he has spent it.
.
"Such ambiguity of roles, as Sachs and others like him
have, doesn't serve well the people who are getting
advice and don't know the motives and income sources
of the consultants who are providing it," she said.
"And the shifting mix of roles certainly doesn't serve
well those donors or governments who are trying to
provide impartial advice."
.
No one, including Wedel, doubts Sachs' brilliance and
determination, and even his harshest critics say that
he often gets results. As a high-profile advocate for
the problems of poor countries, he has been hailed as
a visionary even while being criticized as a showboat.
.
"He's a passionate person," said Nancy Birdsall,
president of the Center for Global Development, a
policy research group in Washington of which Sachs is
a director, "and what I like about it is that the
passion is mixed with some real deep understanding."
.
Sachs began his career as an innovative expert on
international economics in the early 1980s. Once he
received tenure at Harvard, he shifted his attention
from theory to practice, traveling extensively to
advise countries in economic crisis. Then he became
director of a Harvard research institute and a leading
proponent of debt relief for poor countries.
.
Now he is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
and a professor. He is also an economics adviser to at
least a half-dozen countries, a point man on
development for Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the
United Nations and a tireless advocate for big
injections of foreign aid to fight AIDS, malaria and
other diseases that ravage poor countries.
.
Sachs' reputation as an academic economist and as a
savior for countries in economic distress has eroded
since its peak a decade ago. At that time, he was a
well-known advocate of economic "shock therapy" for
former Soviet-bloc nations - a rapid, often painful,
transition to minimally regulated capitalism. Despite
a record others call mixed, he still maintains that a
barnstormer like him is crucial to victory in the good
fight.
.
"It's the essence of what I do," Sachs said of his
high-profile work with Annan and Bono, the singer who
advocates for aid to developing countries, and of his
visits to two or three foreign capitals a month. "You
can't do all that you need to do in understanding
economics sitting in an office."
.
Questions about academic rigor have sprung up in the
midst of Sachs' latest campaign, which seeks a
substantial increase in foreign aid for
disease-fighting drugs and other public health
measures for poor countries.
.
A report drafted by a committee he led contended that
spending $101 billion on health would save 8 million
lives a year and lead to additional annual income
gains of $186 billion. Vaccines and preventive
measures costing just $40 a year per person, the
report argued, would pay vast dividends in poor
countries around the world.



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