Jeffrey Sachs, public intellectual.

Common Wealth, the recent release from economist and social scientist Jeffrey Sachs, is his second New York Times bestseller. It is the second effort by the Harvard Ph.D. to lift a seemingly dead horse for one last societal beating, and it is the second time readers will slosh through nearly 400 pages of at times completely banal policy arguments on how best to save the world. And yet people all over the world—everyday citizens, global policy makers, foreign aid workers—continue to buy into his dream of saving the world, one impoverished nation at a time.

Economics and global poverty has been the topic of theoretical debate from Karl Marx to Adam Smith, but none have found the following or the successes of Jeffrey Sachs. He is guided both by an undeterred sense of urgency and, his critics would say, an inflamed ego to the point of relentlessness. But what all seem to agree on is that he has reignited the age-old fight, determined not to let the daunting task of solving global poverty diminish the hope for a solution. He applied theories he proposed as an academic while teaching at Harvard and later the Columbia University Earth Institute, and in doing so salvaged the governments of Bolivia, Poland, and Mongolia. He transcended from merely influencing thought, as a public intellectual, to influencing action globally. And it’s working.

A brief history of the man behind the curtain: A gifted child from the get-go, Sachs showed mathematical promise at the age of 12. He finished high school early, attended Harvard for an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics, and became a tenured Harvard professor at the age of 29. Over the course of the following 19 years, Sachs became the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade, the Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development at the Kennedy School of Government and the Director of the Center for International Development. In 2002, he left to direct the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he remains today.

Academia aside, it was his public work that propelled his theories into view. In 1985, Sachs traveled to the mountains of Bolivia. An inflation rate of 25,000 percent was swallowing the country whole, at a rate unseen since the days of the Weimar Republic. Sachs sat down with government officials and introduced what would soon become his trademark: Shock Therapy. Within days, the country abruptly shifted to a free market economy. He enforced massive layoffs of employees, an overhaul of the tax system, cuts in government spending, and nationwide debt cancellation. When Sachs left, the inflation rate was 15 percent.

Soon after, he traveled to Poland to achieve the same results. Then Slovenia. Then Mongolia. After a failed attempt at overhauling the Russian government, Sachs moved to take on Africa, a decision his critics say is overzealous, ego-driven, and an attempt at redemption after his Russian failures. In a July 2007 Vanity Fair article, head of Britain's Department for International Development in Kenya Simon Bland cast his criticisms on Sachs:

I want to say, 'What concept are you trying to prove?' Because I know that if you spend enough money on each person in a village you will change their lives. If you put in enough resources—enough foreigners, technical assistance, and money—lives change. We know that. I've been doing it for years. I've lived and worked on and managed [development] projects. The problem is, when you walk away, what happens?

Sachs’ would respond by saying that this is a cop out, that the previously accepted excuse—the task at hand is too overwhelmingly grandiose to bother—is not enough, and he has the numbers to prove it. According to Sachs’ 2005 bestselling book, The End of Poverty, Africa can be eradicated of its extreme poverty—subsisting on $1 a day—within 20 years. Currently, annual international aid amounts to $65 billion. By the year 2015, we could feasibly increase that number to $195 billion, saving 8 million lives a year and generating economic benefits off of the new development worth $360 billion a year. By Sachs calculations, these numbers result in less than one percent of the total income of what he calls “the rich world.”

One of the principles Sachs presses repeatedly is that of global cooperation, and it is hard to miss the invocation of John F. Kennedy in his writings. In Kennedy’s Peace Address at American University in 1963, he said:

Too many of us think [that peace] is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief... Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants… Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions—on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned… Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation.

Kennedy, no doubt, was an idealist. And while the profundity of his ideas may linger because of his early death, many would argue the greatness that he would have accomplished in life. It is a stretch to say Jeffrey Sachs is a modern day Kennedy, but there is something to be said to those that can successfully sow the seeds of idealism to serve a world plagued by reality.

Despite his critics, what seems to draw people to Sachs’ work is the palpability of his ideas, logical solutions to seemingly impossible problems. In Sachs’ eyes, he is not an idealist, for nothing he does is idealistic but rather necessary. It is problem solving. In an April 2008 US News and World Report Q&A, Sachs’ answer to the end of poverty was simple: think technologically.

People are poor because they lack productivity. They lack productivity because they don't have the tools to become more productive. Those tools include the basic inputs to raise farm yields above subsistence levels. For urban centers, it means broadband, electricity, and working ports. My concern is for the places that need the tools and simply can't pay for them. They're trapped. Those places are where we should give targeted help.

However, is it possible that this accessibility to his ideas and unrelenting hope could become a weakness rather than a strength? Sachs has made a living by bringing global poverty back into the foreground in a palpable manner for those outside the economic sphere. However, critics would say that this diminishes his status as a public intellectual, so awash in his own arguments that he is willing to oversimplify the process.

In an August 2007 blog post entitled “The ‘Decline’ of the Public Intellectuals?” writer Stephen Mack argues “we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.” Many have argued toward the motives of Sachs’ grandiose goals—motivated by pride? Bitter from his failures in Russia?—when here is a man who has taken on the single greatest task in the future of our world.

In the same post, religious critic Jean Bethke Elshtain spoke at a panel discussion on the necessity of cynicism by the modern-day public intellectual:

The public intellectual needs, it seems to me, to puncture the myth-makers of any era, including his own, whether it's those who promise that utopia is just around the corner if we see the total victory of free markets worldwide, or communism worldwide or positive genetic enhancement worldwide, or mouse-maneuvering democracy worldwide, or any other run-amok enthusiasm. Public intellectuals, much of the time at least, should be party poopers.

However, what Elshtain fails to see is the distinction between criticism and party-pooperism. The former requires a skeptic eye aimed at society, geared toward finding its flaws, thus prompting an open discussion on how best to fix them. Criticism, Mack says, is the duty not just of the public intellectual, but of every citizen in a democracy. However, a push for party-pooperism is a push towards cynicism and inaction, a puncturing of the idealism that, though maybe not ultimately attainable, drives progress. To ask the public intellectual to look toward the future with criticisms of the past, but not promise a better world to the next generation, is to ask great thinkers to be lame-ducks. It is a cop-out of action to criticize the failings of the world without getting up to change it.

Jeffrey Sachs has catapulted his cause from economics classroom to the center of the global stage. Bombarded by his fair share of critics calling him naïve, ego-driven, and walking blindly into the dark, Sachs is undeterred at ridding the world of the poverty that plagues it. He is revered as a political activist, a policy maker, and a public intellectual of the academic circuit. Though he may bend the conventions of policy making, he is achieving progress toward a fight most have left by the wayside. For that, he stands far above the rest.