Jeffrey Sachs

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 1993, the New York Times called Jeffrey Sachs "probably the most important economist in the world." That reputation has carried him a long way. Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst. He has advised governments from Bolivia to Poland to Russia, led United Nations projects, and written many books. He has also drawn sharp criticism, on subjects ranging from poverty programs to the origin of COVID-19. How does one economist end up praised and condemned in the same breath? What did his remedies actually do to the countries that tried them? And why do admirers and critics so often read the same record so differently?

  84112

• 2. Detroit To Harvard

  ›

  Jeffrey David Sachs was born on the 5th of November 1954 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in nearby Oak Park, part of the Detroit metropolitan area. His mother was Joan, born Abrams, and his father, Theodore Sachs, was a labor lawyer. The family is Jewish.

  Oak Park High School came first, then Harvard College, where he earned a B.A. in Economics, summa cum laude, in 1976. A master's degree followed in 1978 and a Ph.D. in 1980, both in economics at Harvard. His doctoral supervisor was Martin Feldstein. From 1978 to 1981 he also served as a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

  Harvard hired Sachs as an assistant professor in 1980, and he became an associate professor in 1982. A year later, at age 28, he was a tenured professor of economics. Over the next 19 years he became the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade. He directed the Harvard Institute for International Development from 1995 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002 he directed the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School. Michael C. Burda was among his doctoral students.

  From 2002 to 2016, Sachs directed the Earth Institute of Columbia University, an interdisciplinary body built to tackle complex problems facing the planet. He is now a university professor there and directs its Center for Sustainable Development. His classes run through the School of International and Public Affairs and the Mailman School of Public Health. His undergraduate course is called "Challenges of Sustainable Development."

  124710

• 3. Shock Therapy Abroad

  ›

  Bolivian hyperinflation had reached as high as 14,000% when Hugo Banzer asked Sachs for help. Banzer was running in the 1985 general election and wanted an anti-inflation plan ready if he won. Sachs built it around price deregulation, especially for oil, along with cuts to the national budget. He said the plan could end the hyperinflation in a single day.

  Banzer lost to Víctor Paz Estenssoro, yet the plan was carried out anyway. Inflation stabilized quickly. Within weeks, hyperinflation had fallen. Bolivia also settled its $3.3 billion debt to international lenders for about 11 cents on the dollar. At the time, that debt equaled about 85% of the country's GDP.

  In 1989, Sachs advised Poland's anticommunist Solidarity movement and the government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He wrote a comprehensive plan for moving from central planning to a market economy. Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz led the reform program that absorbed it. Sachs was also the main architect of Poland's debt reduction operation.

  Working with IMF economist David Lipton, Sachs advised converting all property and assets from public to private ownership at speed. Many uncompetitive factories closed. His first idea for ownership was the U.S. model, with professional managers answering to many shareholders and stock markets playing a large role. Polish authorities disliked it. He then proposed putting large blocks of privatized companies' shares into the hands of private banks. Shortages and inflation followed, but prices in Poland stabilized by 1991.

  In 1999, the Polish government gave Sachs the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit, one of its highest honors. The Kraków University of Economics awarded him an honorary doctorate.

  Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev sought Sachs's advice after Poland's success, and so did Gorbachev's successor, Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Sachs's methods for stabilizing economies became known as shock therapy. They resembled approaches used in West Germany after World War II. Criticism came after the Russian economy struggled badly in the early 1990s under market-based shock therapy.

  Canadian journalist Naomi Klein named Sachs one of the architects of "disaster capitalism." She argued that his recommendations in Bolivia, Poland and Russia left millions of people in the streets. Once the post-communist work was behind him, Sachs turned to poverty, health and the environment.

  2021222425

• 4. Ending Extreme Poverty

  ›

  The Idealist, Nina Munk's biography of Sachs, describes a man whose ambitions are hard to overstate. She wrote that his ultimate goal was to change the world, to "bend history," a phrase he borrowed from Robert F. Kennedy. By the early 2000s he had gone from wonky academic to celebrity public intellectual. George Soros, one of his patrons, told Munk, "There's a certain messianic quality about him."

  Since 1995, Sachs has worked on easing poverty in Africa. His central farming argument is concrete. With improved seeds, irrigation and fertilizer, subsistence farms could raise yields from 1 ton per hectare to between 3 and 5 tons. Higher harvests would lift farmers' incomes. He does not think more aid alone is the answer, and he backs credit and microloan programs where they are missing.

  The Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, gave him a platform. They are eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger and disease by 2015. In 2000-2001 he chaired the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. It helped scale up financing for health care and disease control in low-income countries. That same year he worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to design and launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He also worked with senior officials of the George W. Bush administration on PEPFAR, against HIV/AIDS, and the PMI, against malaria.

  From 2002 to 2006, on Annan's behalf, Sachs chaired the UN Millennium Project, tasked with a concrete action plan for the goals. The UN General Assembly adopted its key recommendations at a special session in 2005. Sachs was special adviser to the UN Secretary-General from 2002 to 2018, serving Annan and later António Guterres. In that role he often met foreign dignitaries and heads of state.

  The work reaches well past health. Sachs is founding editor of the World Happiness Report and co-founded the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project. He co-founded the nonprofit Millennium Promise Alliance, which aims to end extreme poverty and hunger. In 2010 he became a commissioner of the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. Today he is an SDG Advocate for Guterres on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted at a UN summit in 2015.

  Bono and Angelina Jolie became his friends, and both traveled to Africa with him to see the progress of the Millennium Villages.

  3033464532

• 5. The Millennium Villages Verdict

  ›

  More than half a million people live in the Millennium Villages Project, which Sachs directs across more than a dozen African countries. Critics questioned both its design and the claims made for its success. In 2012, The Economist reviewed it and concluded that "the evidence does not yet support the claim that the millennium villages project is making a decisive impact." Critics noted that it lacked suitable controls to show whether its methods caused any gains.

  A 2012 paper in The Lancet claimed a threefold increase in the rate of decline in childhood mortality. Reviewers criticized its methodology. The authors later admitted the claim was "unwarranted and misleading." In her 2013 book, Munk concluded that the project was a failure. She wrote that "sometimes good intentions have left people even worse off than before."

  New York University economist William Easterly reviewed The End of Poverty for the Washington Post and called Sachs's poverty eradication plan "a sort of Great Leap Forward." In his own book, The White Man's Burden, Easterly ran cross-country statistics for 1985 to 2006. He found that once initial poverty and bad government were both controlled for, bad government explained slower growth. He judged the massive aid Sachs proposed ineffective for that reason.

  Travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux called Sachs's $120 million effort to aid Africa a set of temporary measures that failed to last. He focused on Dertu, Kenya, a sparsely populated community of nomadic camel herders. The Millennium Villages Project spent US$2.5 million there over three years. Theroux reported clogged, overflowing latrines and dormitories that quickly fell apart. A livestock market ignored local customs and shut within a few months. One angry resident filed a 15-point written complaint saying the project "created dependence."

  Support has come too. Stephan Richter, editor-in-chief of The Globalist, and former U.S. ambassador James D. Bindenagel credited Sachs with framing and popularizing the language of sustainable development. They wrote, "That is an achievement in which he can rightfully take considerable pride."

  3536757674

• 6. Pandemic And War

  ›

  In spring 2020, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, named Sachs chair of its COVID-19 Commission. The commission was meant to recommend public health policy and improve medical practice during the pandemic. Sachs set up task forces, including one on the virus's origins. To lead it he chose Peter Daszak, a British American disease ecologist whose earlier project, EcoHealth Alliance, had worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

  Sachs grew increasingly drawn to the lab leak theory, which holds that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory. That put him in conflict with Daszak and many other scientists. Daszak left as chair of the task force in June 2021, and Sachs disbanded the group that September.

  In July 2022, Sachs suggested the virus might have leaked from U.S. biotechnology laboratories, while saying that "both hypotheses are viable at this stage." In August 2022, on a podcast hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he said officials such as Anthony Fauci were not being honest about the origins. Critics accused him of "playing politics with the commission and fanning the flames of a conspiracy theory." The commission's September 2022 report, after two years of investigation, said the origins remained unknown and that two possible explanations needed further scientific study.

  In May 2022, three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sachs said Russia would be hard to beat. He argued that Finland's moves to join NATO would undermine a negotiated peace. In his words, "All of this talk of defeating Russia, to my mind, is reckless." In June 2022 he co-signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire and questioning continued Western military support for Ukraine.

  Sachs has suggested the United States was responsible for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. In February 2023, the Russian government invited him to address the United Nations Security Council on the subject. A month later, in March 2023, a group of 340 economists published an open letter. It addressed what they called historical misrepresentations and logical fallacies in his arguments about the war.

  In February 2025, Sachs spoke at the European Parliament at an event called "The Geopolitics of Peace." BSW member Michael von der Schulenburg hosted it. Sachs urged Europe to break free of U.S. influence and chart its own foreign policy. That June, he attended the Forum of the Future 2050 in Moscow, a conference organized by Konstantin Malofeev.

  5662586366

• 7. China, Venezuela, Israel

  ›

  Politico writers Stuart Lau and Luanna Muniz described Sachs as a "longtime advocate of dismantling American hegemony and embracing the rise of China." Sachs argues for closer ties between the United States and China and warns about the danger of rising tensions. He has said the word "genocide" is mistaken for the persecution of the Uyghurs in China.

  In December 2018, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, at the request of the United States. U.S. authorities wanted to extradite her over alleged violations of sanctions against Iran. Soon after, Sachs wrote that her arrest was part of an effort to contain China. He accused the U.S. of hypocrisy, noting that no executives of several fined American companies had been arrested for sanctions violations.

  After the criticism of that article, Sachs closed his Twitter account, which had 260,000 followers. Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at Asia Society, noted that Sachs had written a foreword to a Huawei position paper. He asked whether Huawei had paid him. Sachs said it had not.

  In their 2020 book Hidden Hand, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg wrote that Sachs's arguments on Huawei would carry more weight without his close relationship to the company. They pointed to his earlier endorsement of its "vision of our shared digital future." They also alleged ties to several Chinese state bodies and to the private energy company CEFC China Energy.

  In a January 2021 interview about China's repression of the Uyghurs, Sachs pointed to human rights abuses by the United States. He alluded to the parable of the mote and the beam. Eighteen advocacy organizations wrote to Columbia University to question his comments. Richter and Bindenagel, the same pair who praised him on development, called his stance a classic Communist propaganda ploy.

  A 2019 report by Sachs and Mark Weisbrot, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, linked a 31% rise in deaths in Venezuela between 2017 and 2018 to U.S. sanctions. It said 40,000 people may have died. Weisbrot later said the authors could not prove the deaths resulted from sanctions. A U.S. State Department spokesperson called the report speculation and conjecture. Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann called its reasoning sloppy, because it used Colombia as the comparison case.

  On Israel, Sachs has said the United States is "complicit in Israeli genocide" and could halt the conflict by freezing military aid. Donald Trump shared a video clip in which Sachs criticized what he called Benjamin Netanyahu's "obsessive" efforts to pull the United States into war with Iran.

  6078815452

• 8. Honors And Reach

  ›

  Time named Sachs one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in both 2004 and 2005. In 2005 he received the Sargent Shriver Award for Equal Justice. India gave him the Padma Bhushan in 2007, its third highest civilian honor. That year he also received the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen.

  The awards kept coming. Princeton's American Whig-Cliosophic Society gave him its James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service in 2009. He won the Blue Planet Prize in 2015. In 2017 he and his wife were the first joint recipients of the World Sustainability Award. In 2022 he received the Tang Prize in sustainable development.

  His advisory résumé is long. He has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Development Program. In 1999-2000 he sat on the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission set up by the U.S. Congress. For 2007-2009 he held the Royal Professor Ungku Aziz Chair in Poverty Studies at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. In 2016 he became president of the Eastern Economic Association, succeeding Janet Currie.

  His public positions have not stood still. In 2012, Sachs said nuclear power was the only solution to climate change. By 2021 he suggested carbon neutrality by mid-century could be reached without it, if technology advanced rapidly. In 2015, during the Greek government-debt crisis, he joined Heiner Flassbeck, Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrik and Simon Wren-Lewis in an open letter. It urged German Chancellor Angela Merkel to rethink her policy of austerity.

  Sachs married Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, a pediatrician, and they have three children. Each month he also writes a foreign affairs column for Project Syndicate, a nonprofit association of newspapers that circulates in 145 countries.

  8690914799