Comments on: Jeffrey Sachs sucks: “Poverty Trap” debunked

By: Hans Mouritzen

Hans Mouritzen — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:57:51 +0000

I do too.

By: Hans Mouritzen

Hans Mouritzen — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:57:11 +0000

I will gladly pay half of it.

By: Hans Mouritzen

Hans Mouritzen — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:55:35 +0000

Like him or not, he is providing us with answers to what is wrong with America today – and I doubt you will dispute that is the case. You, on the other hand, has a clever pen and a headful of snooty remarks – both of which will do nothing to better our situation, so grow up, please.

By: Konker

Konker — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:11:05 +0000

I agree that Jeffrey is a self-oriented self-publicising conman. He is very talented in that regard, which is why he has such influence. His Book on The End to Poverty devotes so much space to his role in solving this crisis or that, and his relationship with people of power and celebrity it is quite sickening. I always find his economic arguments typically start with great visions and outcomes that most can agree with, and are then followed up with comedy analysis or suggestions…some half right, many questionable, but by then its too late…people have bought into the vision. He also has slippery shoulders…distancing himself when things go wrong…think of the Soviet Union, Shock Treatment, Dominican Republic. However your free-market alternative tells only half the story. Since the free market drives growth and innovation fantastic, lets have some. And bear in mind that the USA is not close to being a free market economy with over 30% of national wealth being spent by the public sector. But it also creates and widen inequality…the rich and powerful can accumulate wealth as the expense of others. Increasing inequality is bad when you are one of the 2 billion at the bottom of the pile, living on $1 per day. Moreover, where markets don’t work properly, because of corruption, monopoly, oligopoly, difficulty of applying he market to social and environmental aspects, this can and does become abusive. In the USA and Europe this is mitigated. The market drives growth. Regulations stop abuse. And importantly pro-poor programmes target those at the bottom who are created by the market. Even the World bank agrees that growth policies and pro-poor policies are needed for development. The market alone may drive up average growth rates, but it scroos the people at the bottom in developing countries that can’t afford to look after them because it creates poverty. And by the way, if the US constitution was applied to Africa for 100 years, its GDP would be higher. By 2110, my prediction is, it would also be the fattest, unhealthiest, least well educated, most insular, ignorant, violent, selfish, individualist, environmentally, socially and culturally vacuous place on earth.

By: The Jake

The Jake — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 10:16:30 +0000

Emmm. 1.5 billion on 400 million citizens makes less than $4 per capita. Let’s exclude kids and elderly and you’re still at about $10 per taxpayer, on average. Is that really such a big deal?

I do wonder however if it will work – because

A. The money should not again be pocketed somewhere downstream
B. Would it really be enough to fix things?
C. Some people actually earn money because of the (disputed) poverty trap – those
interest payments go somewhere. And no debt means no interest.

By: Ruxi

Ruxi — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:30:18 +0000

I wonder if you are as smart as he is…and if you are doing as much as he is doing to help Africa. It’s so easy to criticize when you don’t know what’s really happening.

By: medaura

medaura — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:33:51 +0000

WTF? Chris: Your level of education, from your own email address, is revealed to be undergraduate. You're spewing your leftist strife everywhere. 1.5 billion dollars is not that much to help an impoverished continent? Then give away your own 1.5 billion, when and if you ever make it. Who do you think you are to decide how much is not that much, enough, or too little, for other people to be forced to pay for something they get nothing out of? Nothing but international welfare! Yet you feel like you have the moral high ground for deliberating with a nonchalantly charitable inclination on money that is not yours. Nick, I'm still waiting for my steamy coffee. It's precious to see the ugly hatred roaming just beneath the mask of the so called progressives. When one exposes their hypocrisy and moral void, they wish them death as a knee jerk reaction.

By: mamijot

mamijot — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:24:38 +0000

But does it really help, Chris?

I have been working for more than a decade in development cooperation and results for Afrika show…. no results. Is just a deep dark hole, oen can hardly see the bottom. Charity in the long run can not be sustainable.But there are no easy answers on how poverty can be tackled and how viscious cycles can be broken. After reading many of all these intelligent artciles, books and papers on this, I still could not build a clear view on that for myself. Is nice to help people, of course! The question is: in which way, so that they would not become dependable and passive?

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:30:24 +0000

I will buy you a coffee, spiked with arsenic and botulism.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:13:27 +0000

this article is ridiculously biased and i wonder what the educational background of the person that wrote this is. To me, they are full of shit. 1.5 billion dollars is not that much to help an impoverished continent.

By: al

al — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:16:39 +0000

i think he’s an amzing person. I completely agree with his policies

By: Cameron Newland

Cameron Newland — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:33:17 +0000

Jeffrey Sachs makes me sick too.

I linked to this post in one of my own, and stole your Sachs photo from Johns Hopkins – kudos:

http://www.cameronnewland.com/2008/03/10/jeffrey-sachs-is-a-fucker/

By: medaura

medaura — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:17:54 +0000

It seems like he's been getting worse (i.e more authoritarian in outlook) over the years, but his core has been constant throughout. Whatever parts of the free-market mechanism he has advocated, have always had a twist to it, were always part of a greater administrative top-down solution. They were seen as efficient means to achieve milestones, but rarely as permanent structural foundations of the economy itself, independent of and uncompormisable by the government. Whenever things seemed to be going right after his advice to governments, he claimed full credit for it, but often when things turned out sour/trickier, he never took responsibility: always blamed it on the governments not fully listening to his advice, or external circumstances, etc. No such thing as empirical reality checks for him, ever.

Check out William Easterly's works for a more thorough analysis of why Sachs is f***ed. No need to buy his books either, the essays he has on his homepage suffice.

By: Mr. Barky von Schnauzer

Mr. Barky von Schnauzer — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:00:54 +0000

Interesting… On its face, it appears his policy advice in Bolivia and Poland in the 1980′s and early 1990′s promoted free markets and private property.