Jeffrey Sachs

Overview

Jeffrey David Sachs ( SAKS; born November 5, 1954) is an American economist and public policy analyst. He is a professor at Columbia University, at which he was formerly director of The Earth Institute and currently director of the Center for Sustainable Development. From 2002 to 2018, Sachs was special adviser to the UN Secretary-General. He has been president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Sachs is co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In 2010, he became a commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, whose stated aim is to boost the importance of broadband internet in international policy. He is an SDG Advocate for United Nations (UN) secretary-general António Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 global goals adopted at a UN summit meeting in 2015. Sachs has written many books and received several awards. His views on economics, on the origin of COVID-19, and on the Russian invasion of Ukraine have garnered attention and criticism.

Early life and education

Jeffrey David Sachs was born in November 5, 1954 in Detroit, Michigan. He was raised in Oak Park, Michigan, part of the Detroit metropolitan area. He is the son of Joan (née Abrams) and Theodore Sachs, a labor lawyer. His family is Jewish. Sachs graduated from Oak Park High School before attending Harvard College, where he earned his B.A. degree in Economics, summa cum laude, in 1976. He continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving an M.A. degree in 1978 and a Ph.D. in 1980, both in Economics. His doctoral supervisor was Martin Feldstein. Sachs was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978 to 1981.

Harvard University

Sachs joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 1980, and was promoted to associate professor in 1982. A year later, at age 28, he became a tenured professor of economics at Harvard. During the next 19 years, Sachs became the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development (1995–1999), and director of the Center for International Development at Harvard Kennedy School (1999–2002). One of his doctoral students was Michael C. Burda.

Columbia University

Sachs is the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is a university professor at Columbia University. From 2002 to 2016, Sachs was director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, a university-wide organization with an interdisciplinary approach to addressing complex issues facing the Earth, in support of sustainable and economic development. Sachs's classes are taught at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Mailman School of Public Health, and his course "Challenges of Sustainable Development" is taught at the undergraduate level.

Scholarship, consulting, and activism

Sachs has advised several countries on economic policy.

Bolivia

Before the 1985 Bolivian general election, Hugo Banzer asked Sachs to advise him on an anti-inflation plan to implement if he was elected. Sachs's stabilization plan centered on price deregulation, particularly for oil, along with cuts to the national budget. Sachs said his plan could end Bolivian hyperinflation, which had reached up to 14,000%, in a single day. Banzer lost the election to Víctor Paz Estenssoro, but Sachs's plan was still implemented. Inflation quickly stabilized in Bolivia. Hyperinflation reduced within weeks after the Bolivian government implemented his suggestions and the government settled its $3.3 billion debt to international lenders for about 11 cents on the dollar. At the time, this was about 85% of Bolivia's GDP.

Poland

In 1989, Sachs advised Poland's anticommunist Solidarity movement and the government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He wrote a comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market economy that was incorporated into Poland's reform program, led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz. Sachs was the main architect of Poland's debt reduction operation. He and IMF economist David Lipton advised on the rapid conversion of all property and assets from public to private ownership. Closure of many uncompetitive factories ensued. In Poland, Sachs was firmly on the side of rapid transition to capitalism. At first, he proposed U.S.-style corporate structures, with professional managers answering to many shareholders and a large economic role for stock markets. That did not sit well with the Polish authorities, but he then proposed that large blocks of the shares of privatized companies be placed in the hands of private banks. As a result, there were economic shortages and inflation, but prices in Poland stabilized by 1991. In 1999, the government of Poland awarded Sachs one of its highest honors, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit. He received an honorary doctorate from the Kraków University of Economics.

Russia

After Poland's success, Sach's advice was sought by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, on the transition of the USSR/Russia to a market economy. Sachs's methods for stabilizing economies became known as shock therapy and were similar to approaches used in West Germany after WW2. He faced criticism after the Russian economy underwent significant struggles after adopting the market-based shock therapy in the early 1990s.

Work on global economic development

Since his work in post-communist countries, Sachs has turned to global issues of economic development, poverty alleviation, health and aid policy, and environmental sustainability. He has written extensively on climate change, disease control, and globalization. Since 1995, he has been engaged in efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa. According to New York Magazine, Sachs's ambitions are hard to overstate... "His ultimate goal is to change the world—to 'bend history', as he once said, quoting Robert F. Kennedy", wrote Nina Munk in The Idealist, a biography of Sachs. By the early aughts, he had risen from wonky academic to celebrity public intellectual. According to Munk, people in Sachs's inner circle affectionately called him a "shit disturber", someone whose ego was offset by a selfless genius and a penchant for challenging orthodoxies. "There's a certain messianic quality about him", George Soros, one of his patrons, told Munk.

Sachs suggests that with improved seeds, irrigation and fertilizer, the crop yields in Africa and other places with subsistence farming can be increased from 1 ton per hectare to 3 to 5 tons per hectare. He said that increased harvests would significantly increase subsistence farmers' income, reducing poverty. Sachs does not believe that increased aid is the only solution. He also supports establishing credit and microloan programs, which are often lacking in impoverished areas. He is a founding editor of the World Happiness Report. Sachs is co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the MDGs. After the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, Sachs chaired the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2000–2001), which played a pivotal role in scaling up the financing of health care and disease control in the low-income countries to support MDGs 4, 5 and 6. He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000–2001 to design and launch The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He also worked with senior George W. Bush administration officials to develop the PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS and the PMI to fight malaria. On Annan's behalf, from 2002 to 2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs. The UN General Assembly adopted the UN Millennium Project's key recommendations at a special session in 2005. In 2010, he became a commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, whose stated aim is to boost the importance of broadband internet in international policy. The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), which he directs, operates in more than a dozen African countries and covers more than half a million people. Its critics have questioned both the project's design and claims made for its success. In 2012, The Economist reviewed the project and concluded, "the evidence does not yet support the claim that the millennium villages project is making a decisive impact". Critics have said that the program did not include suitable controls to allow an accurate determination of whether its methods were responsible for any observed gains in economic development. A 2012 Lancet paper claiming a threefold increase in the rate of decline in childhood mortality was criticized for flawed methodology; the authors later admitted that the claim was "unwarranted and misleading". In her 2013 book The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, journalist Nina Munk concluded that the MVP was a failure. From 2002 to 2018, Sachs was special adviser to the UN Secretary-General. Until 2016 he held a similar advisory position related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger, and disease by 2015. In connection with the MDGs, he was appointed special adviser to the UN Secretary-General in 2002 during the term of Kofi Annan, and later to António Guterres. In his capacity as a special adviser at the UN, Sachs frequently met with foreign dignitaries and heads of state. He developed a friendship with Bono and Angelina Jolie, who traveled to Africa with him to witness the progress of the Millennium Villages.

During the Greek government-debt crisis in 2015, Sachs, Heiner Flassbeck, Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrik, and Simon Wren-Lewis published an open letter to Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel urging her to rethink her government's policy of austerity. As of 2020 he was president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In June 2025, Sachs attended the Forum of the Future 2050 in Moscow, a conference organised by Konstantin Malofeev. Sachs is one of the founders of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project. As of 2026 Sachs is an SDG Advocate for Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 global goals adopted at a UN summit meeting in 2015.

Honorary and other roles

From 2000 to 2001, Sachs was chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization (WHO) and from 1999 to 2000 he was a member of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission established by the United States Congress. Sachs has been an adviser to the WHO, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Development Program. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, the Fellows of the World Econometric Society, the Brookings Panel of Economists, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Board of Advisers of the Chinese Economists Society, among other international organizations. Sachs is the first holder of the Royal Professor Ungku Aziz Chair in Poverty Studies at the Centre for Poverty and Development Studies at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 2007–2009. He holds an honorary professorship at the Universidad del Pacifico in Peru. He has lectured at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford and Yale University and in Tel Aviv University and Jakarta.

Nuclear power

In 2012 Sachs said that nuclear power is the only solution to climate change. In 2021, he suggested that carbon neutrality could be achieved without nuclear power by mid-century if rapid technological development continues.

China

According to Stuart Lau and Luanna Muniz writing in Politico, Sachs is a "longtime advocate of dismantling American hegemony and embracing the rise of China." He said the term "genocide" is mistaken in relation to the persecution of the Uyghurs in China. He has argued for closer relations between the US and China and warned of the danger of tensions between them.