International Man of Misery
by Ron Rosenbaum Apr 22 2009
The global economy is in free fall, but do-gooder Jeffrey Sachs, formerly known as Doctor Shock, is still trying to end poverty and save the world. Can he? Can anybody?
Jeffrey Sachs

1. Do-Gooders Are...IrritatingTokyo: The Palace Hotel. Breakfast with Jeffrey Sachs.

Admit it: Do-gooders are irritating. They make the rest of us seem so self-serving, selfish, and self-absorbed. And of course—for the most part—we are, but who likes to be reminded of it? Yes, millions are starving to death in Africa, but we’ve got our own problems to worry about now. Yet the do-gooders still want to make us feel guilty about famine somewhere far off. Irritating.

But take a moment and consider the plight of Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most prominent poverty fighters, America’s intellectual do-gooder-in-chief. Even when the West was flush with cash, his was no easy task: maniacally crisscrossing the globe, going from one poverty confab to another, trying to get the do-gooder bureaucracies of the world on the same page. Now that we’re in economic free fall? Forget it.

Nobody wants to hear about the eternal “plight of the poor” or what seems like an endless series of famines and slaughters. An estimated $500 billion in aid has been funneled into Africa in the past half-century, and it was never enough. There were always well-meaning types like Sachs, coming around again and again with a metaphorical begging bowl for some new plan or other that would finally fix things and allow us to cross an item off our bucket list: “Cure poverty—done.” ( View a slideshow featuring some of Jeffrey Sachs' celebrity friends.)

But now we’ve got people being forced out into the streets in the great cities of the West, and we’ve got to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to thank the bankers for bankrupting our economy, for god’s sake. Who wants to hear about starving children?

I’d been wondering about the dynamics of do-gooderism even before the crash, back when I had breakfast with Sachs in Tokyo at the Palace Hotel (named after the nearby Imperial Palace) in March 2008. Sachs, the PowerPoint man for Bono and Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Angelina Jolie, had let me accompany him on one of his high-level begging missions to Japan. ( View a graphic outlining Jeffrey Sach's grueling itineary.)

It was a surreal scene that morning. People wearing full-face, high-tech surgical masks and garbed in business attire drifted through the hotel lobby, acting as if that combination weren’t a bit weird or ominous. I thought there must have been some post-atomic Japanese horror movie being filmed nearby until Sachs explained.

It was not fear of breathing in germs, pollution, or radiation-tainted air that motivated the mask wearers, he said. Rather, it was a manifestation of the admirable politesse of Japanese culture: Those who had a cold or the flu wore a mask to better avoid infecting others.

Still, instinctively, it was hard not to feel disapproved of—that the masks were a reproof, as if the wearers were protecting themselves from our uncleanliness. I came to think of this as a kind of metaphor for the way one feels in the presence of all types of do-gooders; it’s as if they’re wearing invisible masks to protect themselves from the cynical, inertial moral contagion of our indifference.

Sachs himself doesn’t give off that vibe of do-gooder disdain. His is not the guilt-tripping emotionalism of a Sally Struthers trudging through the muck of a third-world village on a late-night TV ad, swatting flies away from children with famine-swollen bellies, rubbing our noses in the stench of our unconcern.

No, Sachs is careful to make understated appeals to reason, logic, and economic theory. His two best­selling books, The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, are replete with challenging charts and eye-glazing graphs. Here’s where we are; here’s where the differential equations say we can be, ­saving the starving from Sally Struthers.



Sachs is, after all, a supreme rationalist, a numbers man among bleeding hearts, an economist with a PhD from Harvard and one of the youngest professors ever to get tenure there. He now heads up his own academic mega-think tank, Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He is poverty’s chief public intellectual, the go-to guy when, say, Charlie Rose wants to get serious about the poor. He has been called “the most important economist in the world” by the New York Times Magazine. The Daily Telegraph referred to him as a dispenser of “moral medicine.”

There are doubters, though: policy critics within the “dev biz,” as some insiders call the global antipoverty development institutions. Indeed, Sachs is at the center of a great debate—actually, several linked and probably interminable and unresolvable great debates—over the eternal poverty questions: How bad are things, really? Has the half-trillion dollars funneled into Africa in the past 50 years helped, or—as Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, among others, says—has it actually hurt?

How could it hurt? By distorting the political culture of Africa—fattening corrupt kleptocrats who have diverted untold billions away from the needy and into Swiss bank accounts and crippled their countries’ progress toward self-sufficiency. In other words, the question is whether the corrupt political culture in these poverty-stricken nations must be reformed before aid can make a difference, or whether aid and accompanying development can reform the political culture.

Certain of Sachs’ critics within the dev biz dismiss him as “one of the world’s most gifted self-publicists” flogging “superficially attractive but deeply flawed ideas,” as former World Bank official David Ellerman puts it. He says that Sachs’ prescriptions rely on top-down, neocolonial, interventionist solutions that have failed in the past.

Meanwhile, Naomi Klein, an anti­globalization writer and activist, calls Sachs “Doctor Shock.” She accuses him of having a dark past in which he prescribed not “moral medicine” but “shock therapy” economics for populations that were already too stunned to resist.

Other critics blame him and his whiz-kid colleagues—the so-called Harvard boys, including Obama’s economics guru Lawrence Summers—for missing a historic opportunity more than a decade ago in post-Soviet Russia. The disastrous attempt to turn a titanic collectivist economy into a capitalist democracy virtually overnight—an attempt that “privatized” the Russian economy into poverty, oligarchy, and gangsterism in the ’90s—gave capitalist democracy a bad name and paved the way for Putinism and renewed political and even military hostility, as evidenced by the invasion of Georgia. Will Sachs be remembered for saving the world in Africa or setting it on the path to destruction in Russia?

Sachs calls the reporting on his role in Russia “unfair” and even “ridiculous,” but no doubt he’s a global player: He’s one of the few individuals who can be both credited with a plan for global salvation and blamed for the renewed potential for global destruction.

But we like our do-gooder icons to have problematic pasts, don’t we? It allows us to fit their lives into our favorite contemporary narrative: redemption. Reputational rehab. Becoming the Sally Struthers of intellectuals has allowed Jeffrey Sachs to largely erase his identification with the Russian fiasco and become the white knight of do-gooders, or at least their Don Quixote.

Nonetheless, what Sachs is quick to call the cynicism of his critics can, at times, get under his skin. When it happens, it comes as a bit of a surprise, because on the surface he seems a mild, unassuming, just-the-facts-ma’am type, at least in the presence of a reporter. His undramatic manner is reflected in his emphatically bland garb, the Midwestern flatness of his voice, and the hairpiece-looking (but in fact real) haystack atop his head, all of which suggest not some Northeast Corridor slickster but rather a Corn Belt farm-implements salesman. But once in a while, one can hear what sounds like a combination of injury and outrage in his voice when he gets going on the topic of those who question his solutions.

“I find the level of cynicism among thinking people unacceptably high,” he told me over the phone shortly before the Tokyo trip. “What I don’t really appreciate is the complacency of thinking people—in the sense that there are a lot of very well-trained people who should know better. And if they don’t like my ideas, they should at least feel some responsibility to not just naysay but come up with other ideas. But not to accept 10 million children dying every year of extreme poverty?”



Note that figure of “10 million children,” the ones “dying every year of extreme poverty.” That’s the rhetorical club he wields against cynics, citing it without melodrama during long disquisitions on the conditions necessary to abolish extreme poverty. “Extreme poverty,” by the way, is a technical term in the jargon of the poverty-industrial complex. It doesn’t simply refer to those who are really, really poor. It is the threshold that defines the “bottom billion” of the world’s poor, the ones who earn less than a dollar a day. Extreme poverty—according to the Sachsians, at least—differs from ordinary poverty because the extremely impoverished are so poor, they lack the ability to lift themselves out of the “poverty trap,” another key Sachsian term. That phrase refers to the quicksand of disease, drought, and famine that renders a population unable to escape poverty by their own efforts.

The human cost: approximately 10 million children a year. We never see them appear and disappear from the planet. They may as well be 10 million miles away. Sachs doesn’t tell weepy sob stories about them. He just mentions the number and leaves it up to us to make of it what we will—or to convict ourselves of callousness if we use the abstract number to hold the suffering at arm’s length.



2. The Willy Loman of Antipoverty ProductsSeeing Sachs in action in Tokyo was useful for thinking about these questions. I sat in on about a half-dozen meetings and a shabu-shabu luncheon in the basement restaurant of a Tokyo skyscraper with foreign-ministry officials and got a sense of how Sachs does his job—saving the world and all that—on a daily basis. It’s low-key, collegial, often technical and intellectual, but when you come down to it, Sachs is the Willy Loman of the dev biz. He’s got a six-point program to restore anti­poverty programs after the crash. No, two six-point programs. (Point three of program two: “The dollar will need to depreciate relative to a basket of Asian currencies, a tricky maneuver but no less important for that.”) He has 80 Millennium Villages, demonstration communities in underdeveloped sub-Saharan Africa that need investment at a time when nobody’s investing, even in developed countries. He needs R&D funding for giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the desert that he thinks could solve the renewable-energy problem. On and on.

So at the heart of the do-gooder’s job is incessant travel to do-gooder conferences, public and private, to sell a line of goods. He just got in from Norway, he said in Tokyo. “Norway was a meeting on climate change hosted by the minister of foreign affairs,” he told me over the breakfast buffet at the Palace Hotel. “Since they do such good things, and I have so many links with them, when they called I just had to squeeze it in.”

It’s all about those links. After Tokyo, he’s off to Shanghai and then to South Korea, where a member of the Jeffrey Sachs do-gooder mafia has just been elected prime minister. “The new prime minister is a longtime friend and colleague of mine,” Sachs says. “He is the mentor, in many ways, of the secretary general”—United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon—“who was his deputy, and he’s now acting as special envoy, and suddenly he became prime minister just a couple of weeks ago, and I told him I was going to be in Asia and would like to stop by.”

“At this stage of my life”—Sachs is 54—“it’s actually quite remarkable to see so many colleagues from graduate school or from early days in senior positions. Bob Zoellick and I worked together at Harvard, and he’s of course president of the World Bank now. But we go back 30 years. Today, a classmate of mine was nominated to be deputy governor of the central bank of Japan.” It’s not that Sachs is well-connected. He is the connection.

While he’s known for his association with celebs like Bono and Angelina Jolie (MTV made a documentary called The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa), it’s this government-NGO-academia-think-tank-consultant network that powers the Sachs machine. He makes the connections between the PowerPoints and the power people.



3. Monetizing the Western ConscienceEven in good economic times, altruism is a hard sell. Good luck getting anything out of Congress, where foreign aid has long been about as popular as child porn and which has lately reserved its largesse for the bankers who destroyed our economy.

Still, you have to admire the shrewd way in which Sachs has managed to find a chink in the armor of some of America’s largest private corporations. He divulges his strategy one afternoon at his elegant Upper West Side townhouse, which he shares with his wife, Sonia, and their three children. Columbia University bought the property when it lured him from Harvard in 2002; the university, not Sachs, owns it. It’s an enviable if not showy abode, the walls of which are covered with intricately patterned Bolivian woven fabrics.

The secret of his pitch to corporate America is the way he has sought to put a price on meaning. A low, low price.

He has intuited that, deep down, we all would find a greater sense of meaning in life if we believed that we were engaged, even at a distance, in saving 10 million children a year. Sachs is offering that at rock-bottom rates.

“If my theory is right, and just 1 percent of what we have could make the transformative difference abroad?” he says. “First of all, a lot of people are willing to spend 1 percent on meaning, you know. If it turned out that really you need 10 percent or 15 percent of what we have” to end extreme poverty, “then it’s going to have to be someone else giving a sermon, probably about salvation and fire and brimstone. But if it’s just 1 percent, you can see so many pathways.”

If my theory is right... Of course, there’s that little matter.

But through strength of will, savvy publicity, and a boost from the U.N., Sachs has pushed his agenda to the fore, to the bestseller lists, to Charlie Rose and the New York Times editorial page. For better or worse, the Sachs plan is the most visible one on the table.

What does it consist of? In patchwork charity efforts of the past, “humanitarian rescue” has meant parachuting in vaccination teams here, distributing seed stock there, but with little coordination. As Sachs’ PowerPoint presentation shows, if you bring five or six key elements together, you reach critical mass—the anti­poverty tipping point—and you boost the victims of extreme poverty over the threshold to ordinary poverty, where they are able to make a transition to sustainable living, if not immediate prosperity. That’s what he says he has already accomplished with his Millennium Villages in sub-Saharan African nations.

“These are all previously existing villages,” Sachs told me. “They were impoverished, hungry, and basically devoid of infrastructure and public services at the start of the project.” Sachs persuaded the U.N. to endorse his “quick-impact” program to put the villages on the road to sustainability in 2005. He got key funding from the government of Japan and from private philanthropists he roped in himself, as well as from the U.N. By 2006, after the Sachs blitz, villages like Sauri, in Kenya; Koraro, in Ethiopia; and Mwandama, in Malawi, were seeing food-production increases of 5, 8, and 15 times, respectively.

The idea is that once these villages—which now incorporate a total of about a half-million people, he says—reach economic self-sufficiency, they begin to spread, attracting government and private investment.

Critics have disagreed; one called the Millennium Villages “development Disneylands,” public-relations showcases. But Sachs says what they really show is that it would cost less than seven-tenths of a penny from each dollar of the developed world’s gross national product to end extreme poverty.

“You’ve monetized the Western conscience, right?” I found myself asking Sachs, almost plaintively. “You’ve put a price on how little it would cost to feel good about ourselves.”

“I guess it’s true,” he said. “I’m trying to give people no excuses not to do this.”

When he talks to companies, his pitch is all about talent recruitment and “reputational costs.” He says, “These businesses are finding that when they go to the campuses in the U.S.” to recruit, “often the first thing they hear is, ‘So what are you doing in Africa?’ And they’re stunned. ‘What do you mean, what are we doing? We’re not doing anything in Africa.’ And the students say to them, ‘Well, I want to work for a company that’s doing something in Africa, because I think that’s important.’ And so many companies have come to me and said, ‘We want to do something in Africa; otherwise we can’t recruit.’ It’s very practical.”



Everyone benefits, Sachs says. He allows the companies to buy a good reputation, which recruiters can then sell to the best and brightest in the talent pool.

“I’ve heard it over and over again from CEOs, who say, ‘We’re so happy we’re doing this. It’s the most meaningful thing our business has done, and I can’t tell you how much employee feedback I’m getting and how exciting this is,’ ” Sachs says. And he’s not talking about small fry. “We’re working with General Electric, which has equipped clinics and surgical units and so forth in all of these extremely poor communities, and with fantastic results. And with Ericsson, they’re providing the cell-phone and internet connectivity in all of the village areas, and it’s just a phenomenally—it’s breakthrough technology. To go from a completely isolated world—no electricity, no road, no contact, dying of extreme poverty—to having cell-phone connectivity, which means emergency-health-delivery services, being able to call for one of a hundred reasons, including figuring out what market prices are in three potential places where an output might be transported.

“And KPMG, they’re doing a lot of due diligence and investment-environment and business-environment analysis in these small cities near the villages where we’re working. So they’re using their absolute core business, consulting and accounting acumen, to help cities that most people have never heard of—Kumasi, Ghana; Kisumu, Kenya; or Akure, Nigeria—get their business environment straightened out so that foreign investment can come in. Becton Dickinson has helped us with a lot of diagnostic equipment and support, and Novartis has provided antimalaria medicines to the communities, and Sumitomo Chemical has provided long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets. And the list really does go on.”

Is this the way the world will end poverty? Will Sachs get a Nobel? Or will the crash crush his hopes? Will he turn out to be just another Quixote whose failure leaves the field once again to Sally Struth­ers? Before getting into these matters, perhaps now is the time for a brief PowerPoint-like presentation of the life of Jeffrey Sachs up to that morning in Tokyo.

FIRST SLIDE: Here’s young Jeffrey Sachs growing up in a Detroit suburb, practicing card tricks. His parents were civil-rights activists who inculcated him with reverence for F.D.R. and the New Deal’s use of government intervention to alleviate a downward spiral into misery that free markets alone could not cure. (Sound familiar?)

“I’m a product of a household that is a product of the New Deal,” Sachs told me. “If you look back, that for me is a watershed of good political sense—of how to make a civil society and how to make a peaceful, coherent society that addresses urgent needs and at the same time takes the benefits of free markets. Back to college, I’ve believed in a mixed economy.”

NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Sachs at Harvard, dazzling his elders to such an extent that, at age 29, he becomes one of Harvard’s youngest tenured full professors ever (I hear he did well on his SATs too), being called upon by the government of Bolivia to cure its 14,000 percent yearly inflation rate.

At Harvard, he said, he was powerfully influenced by iconic liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, disciple of economist John Maynard Keynes and the Keynesian tradition of mixed capitalism and government intervention.

Perhaps one reason Sachs emphasizes the F.D.R.-J.K.G.-J.M.K. connection is that critics like Naomi Klein have argued that, in his Bolivian and Eastern European interventions, Sachs had been seduced by the doctrines of Galbraith’s archrival, Milton Friedman, the strict laissez-faire theorist whose “Chicago boys” used “shock therapy” to privatize Chile’s economy without objecting strenuously to the death squads that enforced their “free-market reforms.”

NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Poland, a Sachs success story—after some travail. The trade union Solidarity called in Sachs almost immediately after it took over the government from the Communist Party. In one of Sachs’ favorite stories, he told the union it could save the economy from collapsing under the weight of a $40 billion foreign debt load by just refusing to pay. In a moment that Sachs is obviously fond of recalling, he said, in effect, “Just send all your creditors a postcard telling them the new regime is not honoring any Communist-era incurred debt.” Not a single zloty. It worked!



NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Sachs defending the collateral damage incurred by his sudden “transformations” of collapsing economies, the kind of thing his critics call shock therapy. (In Bolivia, the government kidnapped and sequestered labor leaders to prevent them from interfering with Sachs’ draconian revamping of the economy—“junta-lite” tactics, Naomi Klein called them.) “When a guy comes into the emergency room and his heart’s stopped,” Sachs said, “you just rip open the sternum, and you don’t worry about the scars that you leave. The idea is to get the guy’s heart beating again.”

NEXT SLIDE: There are a lot of debates about how big a role he played in post-Soviet Russia and how much of the blame he deserves, but most agree that it wasn’t a pretty sight by the end. Sachs—along with the other Harvard boys, as they came to be called, à la Friedman’s Chicago boys—parachuted in and convinced Boris Yeltsin’s economic team of “reformers” that rather than move gradually, they needed to privatize immediately, mainly by selling off state assets and giving citizens soon-to-be-useless vouchers to buy stock in the privatized companies that resulted.

It was, by almost all accounts, a horror story. Sachs told me that he feels he’s been victimized by unfair reporting about his role.

I had heard he was touchy about it, and the most I could get out of him was this: “I just think we made a lot of mistakes.” He left it a little unclear who “we” were, suggesting that the key mistake was the Harvard boys’ excessive optimism that the U.S. government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund would cobble together a Marshall Plan-type rescue of Russia in the name of capitalist democracy. They wouldn’t miss a once-in-history opportunity like that, would they? In fact, they would, and they did.

4. Bono and Moron InsuranceNEXT SLIDE: Close-up on Bono, around the year 2000, when he was making the transition from singer-songwriter to would-be saint, getting deeply involved with Africa and antipoverty efforts.

Then, Bono meeting Sachs. “My great friend Bobby Shriver,” Bono wrote in his introduction to Sachs’ The End of Poverty, “had advised me to meet [Sachs] in order to know what I was talking about before I went up to Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of ­Jubilee 2000”—Bono’s third-world debt-cancellation campaign. (Gotta love “my great friend Bobby Shriver.” Bono has picked up the rhetoric of the rich, presumably the better to help the poor.)

Here we see the template for the transaction that has allowed Sachs to put his solutions—his agenda—in the forefront of the public mind, even if some economists don’t consider him to be in the forefront of his profession. (“He’s not even a development economist,” one grumbled to me. “He’s a macroeconomist.”) Sachs is moron insurance for aspiring saintly celebs who want to be do-gooders but don’t want to be seen as celeb airhead do-gooder clichés. In return, the celebs shine their light on Sachs’ projects, like the Millennium Villages, which are photo-op lures for the novice celeb do-gooder. This arrangement may have reached its apogee with MTV’s 2005 documentary about Sachs and Angelina Jolie in Africa.

NEXT SLIDE: 9/11. “My response to September 11 was that I wanted to do something more for the United Nations, and I thought it was particularly urgent and a dangerous time, and I wanted to support multilateral processes,” Sachs said. “And at the same time, Columbia was trying to recruit me. Kofi said, ‘Come as my adviser on the Millennium Development Goals and organize an effort,’ and Columbia University offered me the Earth Institute position, and so after 31 years, I said goodbye to Harvard.”

5. Quixote or Card Sharp? There was a moment in the Palace Hotel in Tokyo that morning that threw into relief the issues raised by Sachs and his critics. We had adjourned from the breakfast room to the lounge, where Sachs was meeting with then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s science adviser.

Sachs is trying to make the transition from being known mainly as a poverty-development person to someone who can straddle the looming divide—death match, really—between the poverty-development do-gooders and the climate-change do-gooders. The rapid development that has raised literally billions of people out of extreme poverty in India and China has been dependent on dirty coal-burning plants. The climate-change people want to reduce dirty-energy use, but doing so, say some of the poverty people, risks cutting off the means of raising starving people out of extreme poverty. Look what happened when the climate-change do-gooders’ cry for biofuels led to land once used for food crops being shifted to growing plants to make fuel: soaring food prices, food riots, starvation spreading again.



Sachs knows of some ingenious ideas for dealing with the energy crisis, one of which he discussed with the science adviser: giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the Sahara desert. According to Sachs, with the right technology, you could focus the glare of sunlight off the desert sand and use the heat to boil water to drive enough energy-producing turbine generators to power all of Europe.

Well, I’m no techie, but it sounded a little far off in the future, if not utterly undoable, to me. (Where does the water come from?) Nonetheless, there was something about the grand, visionary reach of it. It suddenly captured what I found appealing about Sachs: He’s Don Quixote, and the giant parabolic mirrors—the analogy is not precise—are his windmills.

But then, after the meeting with Fukuda’s science adviser, came the revealing moment. I’d asked Sachs what he did in his downtime during his globe-trotting “endless tour.”

Sachs was silent. Then one of his chief assistants, Joanna Rubenstein, prompted him.

“There is sleight of hand,” Rubenstein said.

It turns out, Sachs is something of a card sharp, or anyway a clever trickster with cards.

Sachs didn’t look entirely happy with this disclosure. He says it just kind of happened, his learning to do card tricks. He’d spent a lot of time with cards as a young devotee of bridge.

Still, this unexpected Music Man sharpie side of him dramatizes the divide in the dev biz regarding Sachs: Should we place our confidence in him, or is he a kind of confidence man in the do-gooder trade whose main skill is making himself the center of attention?

“If ending poverty is so easy, why hasn’t it been done?” William Easterly, Sachs’ most vocal opponent, asks. Easterly, a former World Bank official now at New York University and the Brookings Institution, wrote a well-received book called The White Man’s Burden, which accused Western aid programs of being neocolonialist.

And later during that day in Tokyo, I thought I picked up skepticism from some of the earnest Japanese poverty bureaucrats to whom Sachs was appealing for funding for more Millennium Villages, among other projects.

Sachs wanted to encourage the Japanese government to promote private investment in Africa, particularly in ventures that would bring added support and “sustainability” to his development villages and the surrounding areas. The Japanese seemed to me to be politely suggesting that the political culture of these nations (none of which were named) had to change before Japanese businesspeople could be persuaded to set up shop there and provide markets for the products of the Millennium Villages. I got the impression Sachs, on the other hand, believed that successful development was the very thing that could bring about an economic transformation of the political culture of these places—or at least that those 10 million starving children couldn’t wait until after the political culture was changed to be saved. It’s the perennial chicken-and-egg question of antipoverty economics.

It’s difficult for an outsider to judge the different sets of facts and interpretations of facts that each side uses. Even one of Sachs’ allies, Oxford’s Paul Collier, says that Sachs “has overplayed the importance of aid” and that Easterly “is right to mock the delusions of the aid lobby.” On the other hand, Collier says, Easterly “exaggerates the downside and again neglects the scope for other policies.”

True, waiting for trial-and-error, pragmatic, self-generated development sounds far more holistic than Sachs’ interventionist approach. But even his opponents will concede that to wait for the right political and economic culture to evolve before getting vaccination teams and antimalarial medicine into stricken villages is not justified.

Some of Sachs’ successes have been undeniable—particularly his role in implementing the U.S. anti-AIDS and antimalaria campaigns and in advancing the “green revolution” in seed stocks that has allowed once-infertile drylands to feed millions who otherwise would have starved. Such achievements have allowed Sachs to transcend his controversial past. It fits the redemption narrative.

But that’s the past. The future is looking bleak.

6. The Billionaire BegathonOne afternoon in his townhouse in March 2008, months before the crash of the global economy, Sachs was telling me about how exhausting it was to fit the pieces together to get the funding for his programs, how much effort it took to get governments, NGOs, and corporations on the same page.



In a kind of despair, he spoke about what I like to call his billionaire-­begathon fantasy.

Sachs said there were going to be 1,100 billionaires on that year’s Forbes list and their assets would be something like $4.2 trillion. If they allowed him to manage their money, he said, he could show them how they could end extreme poverty all by themselves without the rest of us lifting a finger.

“They wouldn’t have to give away a cent,” Sachs said. He’d just need the interest: “They could just put half their assets into an interest-bearing trust.” He’s done the math. “That would be $2.1 trillion, and 5 percent payment on that would be $105 billion a year. That would do the job. Actually, that would be quite good.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“I’m getting ready to go door-to-door,” he said, at least half seriously.

Still, I kind of like Sachs’ idea for a billionaire begathon: fast, efficient, no more global-poverty confabs. But when I spoke to him a month into the Obama administration, he conceded that the crash had wiped out so much wealth that even his fantasy was, in effect, defunded: This year, Forbes listed just 793 billionaires, worth a total of $2 trillion.

He’s back to doing multipoint programs for the G-20 nations. He emailed me a 45-page, small-type proposal, “Smallholder Food Production and Poverty Reduction: Principles for a Financial Coordination Mechanism (FCM) to Support Smallholder Farmers.”

On the phone, he was talking a mile a minute, dancing as fast as he could, describing the multitude of effects that the economic crisis has had, about how “it’s been a very, very tough few months. With African economic growth cut in half, cuts in foreign aid, everything has been made more urgent, especially the food crisis, and I’ve been spending a major amount of time trying to mobilize desperately needed funding for peasant farmers, and—it’s just overwhelming.” He uses phrases like “shockingly difficult” and “nightmare” and wonders aloud, almost hopelessly, why, when trillions are being thrown around, a few billion can’t be found to fight the extreme poverty that kills 10 million kids a year.

I took it all in, and later I found myself wondering, Why does he do it? Especially now, when it seemed to me the subtext of all these new six-point proposals and 45-page G-20 programs is that everything he’s built up in the past decade is sliding down the tubes, and he’s engaged in a desperate Sisyphean effort to roll the rock up the hill from the bottom again.

I can’t read minds. But I have a feeling that at least part of the answer to

why he does it is because he can, and because there are not too many others who can hold the whole miserable picture in their mind and, instead of giving up hope, translate the misery into salvific equations.

It’s probably hopeless, even more now than it was before, but he does it because, I suspect, he thinks no one else could.

And he just doesn’t want to leave the job to Sally Struthers.