Jeffrey Sachs

Resumen del libro

An investigation of Sachs's schizophrenic career, and the worldwide havoc he has caused.

Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A special advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and described by the New York Times as "probably the most important economist in the world," Sachs is also a "celebrity economist", regularly canoodling with the stars, who has accompanied Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa.
But this dual identity conceals a more sinister division. Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, providing moral condemnation of the 1 percent, and promoting his solution to extreme poverty in the Millennium Villages Project. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s he was notorious as the pioneer of a brutal form of free market engineering called "shock therapy," which had catastrophic social consequences in Bolivia and Poland, and its most severe impact in Russia.

Author Japhy Wilson tells the story of how Sachs rose to stardom and fell from grace in Russia, before rebranding himself as an evangelical development expert and savior of the Third World, while actually working to reinforce the neoliberal project that he now claims to oppose. Based on documentary research and on-the-ground investigation of the Millennium Villages Project, Jeffrey Sachs exposes its subject's Jekyll/Hyde complex, showing Mr. Aid to be no more than the new, more human face of Dr. Shock himself.