Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. Sachs is one of the youngest economics professors in the history of Harvard University. He has been known for his work on the challenges of economic development, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, debt cancellation, andglobalization.
Education
Charming and popular, Sachs was Oak Park High School student council president. However, unlike most teens, he was passionate and active about politics. Sachs marched on Moratorium Day, a day university students around the nation spent protesting the Vietnam War and calling for its end. Sachs also attended rallies that featured the legendary United Farm Worker leader Cesar Chavez.
He graduated from Oak Park High School. He attended Harvard College, where he received his B.A. summa cum laude in 1976. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and was invited to join the Harvard Society of Fellows while still a Harvard graduate student.
Career
In 1980, he joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982. A year later, at the age of 28, Sachs became a Full Professor of economics with tenure at Harvard.
During the next 19 years at Harvard, he became the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade, the Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development at the Kennedy School of Government (1995–1999), and the Director of the Center for International Development (1999–2002).
In 2002, Sachs left Harvard to become the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia he is the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and is also a professor in Columbia's Department of Economics and the Department of Health Policy and Management. His classes are taught at the School of International and Public Affairs and theMailman School of Public Health, and his course "Challenges of Sustainable Development" is taught at the undergraduate level.
In his capacity as Director of the Earth Institute, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development. Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of University education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S. He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree. The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College. The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.
Sachs’ policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.
In 2011 Sachs called for the creation of a third U.S. political party, an "Alliance for the Radical Center".
Views
My work has focussed on three areas of international economics: comparative macroeconomic performance of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development economies, the scope of macroeconomic policy among these economies, and the nature of international lending to developing countries. On the first topic, I collaborated with Michael Bruno for several years in the study of the supply shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s and the ensuing stagflation in the industrialised economies. That work led to an investigation of the role of external disturbances (such as higher energy prices) in macroeconomic adjustment, and more importantly, to the role of labour market institutions in the adjustment process.
We were among the first researchers to point out that European wage indexation was a major factor in the prolonged high unemployment since 1973. The work is pulled together in our book, Economics of Worldwide Stagflation. On the topic of international policy co-ordination, I have undertaken theoretical and empirical work to investigate the potential macroeconomic gains of closer coordination of macroeconomic policies
among the industrial economies.
Starting from the theoretical result that nonco-operative policy-making is likely to be Pareto-inefficient, I have used large-scale econometric models to investigate the magnitude of the inefficiency. On the issue of international lending, I have been investigating the origins of the international debt crisis in the 1980s, as well as trying to identify the structural features of international lending that make the loan markets susceptible to such crises. The work stresses the non-enforceability of international loans, and the types of market failures that can result therefrom.
Also, I am designing large-scale econometric models of global macroeconomic balance that can help to assess the prospects for continued debt servicing.