From Psychotic to Benign?

via A Tiny Revolution, an interesting article on the strange career path of Jeffrey Sachs:

Jeffrey Sachs is a complicated guy. His first claim to fame was as the doctor who administered "shock therapy" in Bolivia, Poland, and Russia. Now he's Bono's traveling companion. Bono wrote the intro to Sachs's latest book ("My professor.... In time, his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine"), and Sachs gushes all over Bono in the text ("Bono brilliantly brought the AIDS tragedy to the attention of several key leaders of the religious right...").

This book is a manifesto and how-to guide on ending extreme poverty around the world. The subtitle, "Economic Possibilities for Our Time," echoes Keynes's famous 1928 essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," which forecast, rightly, that we would be able to meet all the basic material needs of humankind two generations later - essentially today. We could, but we don't. Worldwide, about 1 billion people live on the equivalent of less than $1 a day, the official definition of extreme poverty; 2 billion live on less than $2, which officialdom considers normal poverty. These estimates have been criticized for being too low, and the definition of poverty for being too crude, but still, the numbers are criminally large. ...

On one level, Sachs's analysis and agenda are unremarkable. Many have written on how much the poor of the world suffer, and how little it would cost to reduce that suffering. But we've almost lost sight of a remarkable fact: this is Dr. Shock, Jeffrey Sachs!

For the record, I don't trust Sachs, period. Russia was destroyed by his policies, and other countries very nearly so. As the article mentions, Russia saw it's GDP decline by half by taking Sachs' advice, an event unprecedented in history outside of a major war. It's probably fair to say that outside of members of various large Communist parties, there's few humans alive today who are as reponsible for poverty as Jeffrey Sachs. There's nothing that Sachs can do - including joining the development party far too late - that can make up for his crimes.

That he's adding his name to ideas that have been developed by others is laudable, but nothing in his book is new, and I have a hard time believing that it's anything but his own ego that is driving him down this road. Maybe it's an attempt on his part to avoid the otherwise-inevitable trial for crimes against humanity.

You might have guessed I'm not a fan.