Has Jeffrey Sachs changed his tune...

[Mathew Forstater]

my amateur psychological take (not much more reliable than the rest of my
takes) on people like Sachs and some of his ilk is that they display a
tendency found among certain types of neoclassical economists: they revel in
shocking people, saying things that people won't expect them to say or that
will make people do a double take.  this is not the kind of
counter-intuitive stuff that Keynes and his gang enjoyed, which was based on
fallacies of composition type paradoxes of macroeconomics, but more stuff
based on micro-logic.
For awhile, his shock therapy stuff served that purpose, but then it became
received wisdom and so it became a yawn for him.  plus maybe the "change"
will make people forget some of the disastrous effects of the policies he
promoted.  wasn't Sachs in Malawi not too long ago saying sweatshops would
be great?  krugman said something similar I believe.  or was it summers?  i
get them all mixed up.  in any case, the infamous summers memo when he was
at the world bank saying things like move dirty industries to Africa where
the air quality is "vastly inefficiently low" (this is Orwellian code for
'there air is too clean') and move chemical production linked to prostate
cancer to Africa because the people there don't live long enough to make it
a problem(!) (i'm not making this up), etc., this represents the same kind
of thing.  I imagine these guys (they are mostly guys) all goose-pimply
thinking how people will react to their latest (of course the summers' memo
was not meant to go public we are told, so it was just that he "got
caught").  so maybe sachs and stiglitz and summers and krugman are going to
be our new heros.  maybe they are all repenting. maybe they can get together
and work to change the economics profession, starting with the graduate
economics curriculum.  or maybe they can hold a prayer breakfast.

Carl Remick wrote:


> ...or am I just tone deaf?  Just read a piece of his in the current
> Economist (9/12) "Making It Work," where he emerges as a nemesis of the
> whole West-o-centric, top-down, model of global economic development.
> He says that a "G16" (including eight LDC members) should be substituted
> for the G8, that there should be massive cancellation of external debt
> in the poorest nations and that developmental aid should shift from
> short-term loans to outright grants.  He says it should be recognized
> that the IMF/World Bank have no political legitimacy in the developing
> world, e.g.: "A G16 summit should take up fundamental reform of the
> international assistance process itself.  The aim should be to restore
> legitimacy to local politics, and abandon the misguided belief that the
> IMF and World Bank can micro-manage the process of economic reform."
>
> To be sure, he also says: "Developing countries are not trying to
> overturn Washington's vision of global capitalism, but rather to become
> productive players in it" -- and that's what he want to help.
> Nonetheless, Sachs seems to be more fundamentally critical of central
> institutions of global capitalism than I had been aware.  I'm confused.
> When The Wall Came Down, Sachs struck me as the embodiment of Western
> arrogance in his meddlesome, market-oriented prescriptions for Russian
> "reform."  When did he become such a bleeding heart?
>
> Carl Remick