Sachs, The Great

Jeffrey Sachs is a very smart man. No one is promoted to full professorship at Harvard at the age of 29 who is not incredibly smart. The End of Poverty is the product of such an intelligent economist; it is sufficient to prove that Sachs understands the modern theories of macroeconomics as thoroughly as any of his peers. The first half of the book seemed to me to be a declaration of just how wonderful and intelligent Professor Sachs really is. It is laid out in such a way as to show that he has all the answers to the world’s economic problems and if policy makers would only give sufficient heed to his suggestions the world would truly see “the end of poverty”. Sachs’ comparison of development economists like himself to clinical physicians furthers the purported legitimacy of his work around the world. To Sachs the science of eliminating poverty and establishing economic prosperity is not much different than the science of medicine. With this imagery it is easy to imagine Sachs as being the head physician of the hospital of economics, administering a simple cure of shock therapy to ailing patient countries stuck in a poverty trap.

The main question that came to my mind while reading The End of Poverty was if there is ever a limit to what a physician really understands. One of the principal maxims of medical ethics reads “Primum non nocere” or “first, do no harm”. If development economists like Sachs aspire to don the scalpel of an economic surgeon they would also be wise to recognize the limits of their knowledge and tools lest they do more harm than good. Throughout history millions of people have suffered at the hands of those who mistakenly believed they were doing good. Sachs, the UN, the IMF and the governments of wealthy nations should exercise caution when crafting grand plans to shock economies into prosperity. A true clinical economist would observe the past efforts that have been attempted to cure the ailment. In the case of poverty much has been attempted but Sachs simply dismisses past attempts to lift poverty stricken counties as not being as well thought through as his plans. When I hear such prescriptions as Sachs’ I cannot help but hear the words of F.A. Hayek in The Fatal Conceit saying “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” I hope for the sake of the world that what Sachs imagines he can design and carry out is really possible and he is not doing something akin to bloodletting his patients in an attempt to cure common ailments as ancient physicians did when they couldn’t admit they didn’t understand the problem.