Five Minutes With: Jeffrey Sachs

By Andrew Garib, Cornell University

There aren’t many economists – or professors of any kind for that matter – who can fill an auditorium on a college campus as quickly as Jeffrey Sachs. The Columbia academic with the rock-star persona, Jeffrey Sachs has used his share of fame to travel the world bringing attention to the dire situation of poverty in the world today. His frequent sidekick? No less than U2 lead singer Bono.

Globe-trotting Sachs is both the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia in New York and Special Advisor to United Nations’ Secretary General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He’s best known for his diagnoses and prescriptions for developing economies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. After honing his economics skills at Harvard, Sachs led the controversial effort to bring former Soviet socialist republics into a world of free markets and democracy through a process of rapid privatization known as “shock therapy” – the results of which made some progressives uneasy at best. But in recent years, he has become known for his work with international agencies and local governments to address poverty, debt cancellation, and the spread of HIV/AIDS and other killer diseases in the developing world.

Campus Progress recently spoke with Professor Sachs from his New York office about his new book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, eliminating poverty, his collegiate inspiration, and his not-so-typical approach to academia.

CP: The End of Poverty, according to Robert Cole, who wrote a mixed review on AlterNet, is “an autobiography, a moral call to arms, and a technical blueprint all rolled up into one massive book dedicated to eradicating poverty by 2025.” The need is greater now than ever – 1.5 billion living under two dollars a day, 114 million children with no education whatsoever. What caused this situation to come about?

JS: The book takes the view that the most difficult places on the planet tend to be those that suffer serious problems with regard to food production, disease control, transport and access to international markets. And in addition to the normally discussed political and economic factors there are very important geographical, climatic and ecological factors that are also playing an important role. The key is to make a good diagnosis and then make a set of prescriptions that can meet the implications of that diagnosis.

CP: You’re a huge advocate of the rich world’s meeting the Millennium Development goals (that’s 0.7 per cent of GNP) but America is stuck at a lousy 0.15 cent on every GNP dollar. After meeting recently with Tony Blair, President Bush seemed frustrated when prompted to do more on the debt relief issue. Bush has given $674 M, he’s given more aid to Africa than any other president. Is he justified in being ‘frustrated’? Is this slow steps or is this really just stinginess?

JS: I think that it is completely insufficient on three criteria: first, compared to what the U.S. has promised; second, compared to what the U.S. could do; and third, compared to what is actually needed to solve the problem. So by all three measures, I think the Bush administration is falling very far short.

CP: You’re not a typical academic by any measure. While many of your colleagues stick to the books and the lecture halls, you’re all over the world, you’re traveling, you’re working right on the ground. How do you feel about being a leading academic with so much star power? Does it hurt or help you?

JS: Getting out of the classroom and into the field is very important, because I don’t think that one can really understand these problems by working only with books. I found in my own experience in a quarter century that it’s only by being on location working on these problems that it’s possible to pick and choose accurately among all the various theories. Until I started working intensively myself in Africa a decade ago, I did not have a clear understanding about the dire effects of malaria and AIDS in holding Africa back, and I certainly didn’t understand how little the world was helping Africa to fight these diseases, because I heard the speeches, I heard the kind of explanations of the kind our president gives, and I was more inclined to take them at face value, I suppose, because I didn’t really know the situation. To me, it would be like trying to be a doctor without having ever seeing a patient. [See hyperlink – ed.] It wouldn’t make sense. And that’s why I talk about my recommendation for clinical economics, as economics that is practiced like a medical doctor practices medicine. That is, it’s science-based, but it’s actually based on the experience of dealing with real economies.

CP: What are some specific examples from your recent travels that have convinced you that aid can be successful?

JS: I know a lot of critics say aid doesn’t work, but that is much too general of an idea. I’ve now seen directly how well-targeted aid can make a huge difference, whether it’s delivering bed nets to children to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes or helping people with anti-retroviral medicines in poor communities. Practical investment actually saving lives. When I talk about how aid could work, I’m talking about using aid to solve particular problems.

CP: You talk a lot about how not just the quantity of aid, but the quality of aid is definitely essential to this kind of work. With that in mind, what do you think about the recent efforts of Bob Geldof and the Live8 concert in Philadelphia on July 2nd?

JS: Well, I think that those efforts are tremendous for public awareness. Bono is heard all over the world and he is extraordinarily eloquent, he’s really been a critical center of connectedness in the world. They’re on the right track, of course, saying “look what we could do if we put our effort to it.” It’s a matter now of transferring that awareness into real development aid and then making sure that the real development aid is used in a very practical way: to fight malaria, or to build clinics, or to help farmers grow more food.

CP: How can college students and activists work to raise the profile of the need for development aid in places like sub-Saharan Africa? And how in particular do we get progressives’ attention about the need for aid abroad?

JS: I deeply encourage and admire all the students that are getting involved right now. They’re absolutely on the right track. We are doing something called the Millennium Promise, which will launch later this summer. So stay tuned. The website will have the materials for training, for teach-ins, for school curricula from the university level all the way down to the elementary school level about global poverty. It’s going to have an advocacy campaign element. And it’s going to have a whole action agenda. If people want to give seven dollars so that a bed net protects a child in Africa, or if they want to get together in their community and partner with a community in Africa, or if they want to volunteer in a number of ways there’ll be many ways that people can be active.

CP: Now, creative and influential leaders such as yourself often have careers inspired by something they did in college, for example. What inspired you in college?

JS: I had wonderful professors and fellow students, but for me it was the opportunity to see the world, to think hard about what I’m seeing and trying to make comparisons to try and understand why some places were rich and others poor. It was a trip to India in graduate school that really opened my eyes to extreme poverty. It keeps me energized to remember that the main reason I’m in this field is not because I liked the math or I liked the models or the diagrams or whatever, but because I was interested in what the subject was, which was how people can improve their material well-being on the planet. It’s a good question, and I found it kind of captivating.

CP: So you definitely recommend study abroad, huh?

JS: I do, absolutely. Absolutely. See the world, because we’re all going to be growing up in a crowded planet of all sorts of interactions, and people coming from different cultures, different parts of the world, I think it’s a very important thing for people to understand that.

CP: Sometimes governments on the receiving ends of foreign aid, due to corruption or due to civil war, or worse, aren’t the best people to manage and to spend funds received. I’m thinking about Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) or governments like Sudan that perpetrate genocide. When it comes to these extreme and violent regimes, what can we do to help the average person on the ground?

JS: First, this is not to duck the question, but I would say, help the better regimes to show the success stories and the good examples. Because we spend a lot of time understandably bemoaning these horrible places with very bad governments, but we don’t spend enough time helping those with reasonably good governments. When those places are very very poor, even the good governments end up failing and collapsing because poverty takes a terrible toll on political stability.

CP: Is regime change ever a viable option for progressives in these horrible, backwards regimes?

JS: Well, I think that the standard would have to be very, very, very high. I don’t believe at all that it was met in Iraq. I think that was a horrendous mistake, in my opinion.