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

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.