>A couple of people have told me that Sachs likes to think of himself on the
>left. No mea culpas for shock therapy though.
I wonder if this refers to Sachs' role:
"Right after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian government wanted to sell the capital stock of the Russian Republic to its own citizens, who of course had no money to buy it. In one of the grandest innovations in world financial history, the Russian government made 'privatization vouchers' freely available to all 147 million Russians in 1992 and 1993. The vouchers could be used by them to purchase shares in state enterprises. Of the 147 million vouchers, 144 million, or 98 percent of the total, were picked up, making Russia the country with the highest proportion of shareholders in the world at the time. The auction fundamentally transformed the Russian economy: After the auction, most workers were employed by companies with private stockholders. See Maxim Boycko, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, Privatizing Russia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); and Alfred Kokh, The Selling of the Soviet Empire: Politics and Economics of Russia's Privatization -- Revelations of the Principal Insider (New York: SPI Books, 1998). There is unfortunately a widespread perception that the Russian reformers who designed the auction were deeply corrupt, and that this accounts for most of the economic inequality in Russia today. But the inequality in Russia today did not result from this auction. See Anders Aslund, "Inequalities in Wealth Should Not Be Blamed on Russia's Economic Reformers," Financial Times, May 31, 1996, p. 16. A balanced view of the workings, and shortcomings, of this auction can be found in Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown Business, 2000)."
Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century, Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 292-293.
Julio