Jeffrey Sachs - Criticisms

Criticisms

One of Sachs's strongest critics is William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University. Easterly reproached The End of Poverty in his review for The Washington Post, and Easterly's 2006 book White Man's Burden is a rebuttal of Sachs's argument that poor countries are stuck in a "poverty trap" from which there is no escape except by massively scaled-up foreign aid, though Sachs himself has emphasized the need for a complex, multifaceted, clinical and unique approach to economic development, of which increased and responsible foreign aid is nearly always a necessary but insufficient part. Easterly presents statistical evidence that he claims proves that many emerging markets attained their higher status without the large amounts of foreign aid Sachs proposes. Other evidence is included in Easterly's previous work, The Elusive Quest for Growth.

Another Sachs critic is Amir Attaran, a scientist and lawyer who holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development at the University of Ottawa. Sachs and Attaran have worked closely as colleagues, coauthoring a famous study in The Lancet documenting the dearth of foreign aid money to fight HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, which led to the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. But Sachs and Attaran part company in their opinion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and Attaran argued in a paper published in PLoS Medicine and an editorial in the New York Times that the United Nations has misled people by setting specific, but immeasurable, targets for the MDGs (for example, to reduce maternal mortality or malaria). Sachs dismissed that view in a reply to PLoS Medicine, saying that only a handful of the MDGs are immeasurable, but Attaran then cited the United Nations' own data analysis (which the UN subsequently blocked from public access) showing that progress on a very large majority of the MDGs is never measured.

Sachs has also been criticized by leftists for having an overly neoliberal perspective on the economy. Nancy Holmstrom and Richard Smith pointed out that, in advising implementation of his shock therapy on the collapsing Soviet Union, Sachs "supposed the transition to capitalism would be a natural, virtually automatic economic process: start by abandoning state planning, free up prices, promote private competition with state-owned industry, and sell off state industry as fast as possible…". They go on to cite the drastic decreases in industrial output over the ensuing years, a near halving of the country's GDP and of personal incomes, a doubling of the suicide rate, and a skyrocketing unemployment rate. The Lancet has recently reported that rapid privatization of the Soviet Union caused a 12.8% death rate increase among males in just two years, a claim that The Economist attributed to alcoholism, though The Lancet article attributed the rise in alcoholism to changes in the economy.

While dubbed an economic success, the transition orchestrated by Lipton and Sachs in Poland has been met with criticism. An immediate and complete rebuilding of the economic system included gross cuts in public spending, elimination of price controls, opening up to foreign investment and resulted in an increase in interest rates. Most of the state-owned industry base closed doors or was sold to foreign capital.