A Project in Every Port

• Position: an Advisor in the IMF's Research Department.

People in Economics

Prakash Loungani profiles Jeffrey Sachs, peripatetic development economist

IT IS HARD to imagine a more accomplished—and more varied—career than that of Jeff Sachs. Harvard University granted him tenure in 1982 when he was only 28. In his early thirties, he helped Bolivia end its hyperinflation and restructure its debt. Only a few years later, he was drafting the Polish government’s blueprint for transition from communism to capitalism. Stints as advisor to the governments of Russia, Estonia, Burkina Faso, and India—among many others—followed. Sachs campaigned for debt relief for poor countries and, as an advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, developed a plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Since 2002, as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Sachs has set his sights even higher. The Institute, an interdisciplinary group of 850 people, addresses some of the world’s most difficult problems, from eradication of disease to global warming.

All this has given Sachs a superstar status few economists enjoy. In 2005, MTV aired a documentary of Sachs traveling in Africa with the actress Angelina Jolie. Earlier, he had toured with Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, as part of a campaign for debt relief. One of Sachs’s Harvard colleagues at the time, noted economist Robert Barro, recalls that Sachs once invited him to lunch with Bono to discuss the campaign. Barro says his “instinct was to decline,” but he was overruled by his teenage daughter, who said: “Dad, this is the coolest thing imaginable . . . Of course you have to go.”

Sachs’s work also provokes criticism that the policies he champions often have painful side effects. It’s a charge he vigorously denies: “In Bolivia, Poland, and Russia, my work was like an emergency room doctor’s. The patient was already in shock: hyperinflation, mass shortages, political instability, a collapsing currency, and pervasive fear. Armchair critics have little concept of the nature of such tumult, and of the challenges of devising policies in such confusion. Don’t blame the doctor for the condition of the patient coming into the emergency room.”

Harvard ties

Sachs was born in Detroit in 1954. His family’s roots are in Grodno, once part of Poland and then of the Soviet Union. His father was a prominent labor attorney who was active in U.S. Democratic Party politics. His sister, Andrea, recalls that their father always reminded them “to do good while you are doing well.” After considering becoming a lawyer like his father, he turned down Harvard’s law school in favor of its economics department. It was to become his home for 30 years.

As an undergraduate he completed all the course requirements for a doctorate in economics. In 1982, he published a paper in the profession’s leading technical journal, Econometrica, titled “Multiple Shooting in Two-Point Boundary Value Problems.” It’s true he had some help on the paper; his coauthors were David Lipton, now the IMF’s first deputy managing director; Jim Poterba, now president of the National Bureau of Economic Research (the preeminent U.S. economic research organization); and Larry Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former president of Harvard. Even among such a talented cohort at Harvard, Sachs stood out, which the university recognized by giving him tenure at age 28.

What singled out Sachs, however, was not just his technical brilliance but also his interest in tackling the pressing economic issues of the day, formulating solutions, and lobbying for their adoption. Paul Krugman, the economics Nobel laureate, once wrote that “what sets Jeff apart is that he is a first-rate theorist who is also a major political force. It’s a pretty amazing combination.”

Miracle cure

Sachs’s first major project was as economic advisor to Bolivia in 1985. The country was grappling with an annual inflation rate of 60,000 percent. Sachs says inflation rates that high mean that “if by accident you leave [money]...