Reviews and News:
Jeremy Carl reviews Jeffrey Sachs’s new book on sustainable development: “As likely to be seen with Bono in Africa as in a college classroom, Jeffrey Sachs achieved tenure in Harvard’s economics department at 28 before founding the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In the late 1980s and early ’90s he advised, with a decidedly mixed record, nations making the transition away from Communist central planning. Today Sachs directs the Millennium Villages Project, an experiment in “sustainable development” that provides massive doses of targeted aid to poor villages. Its many setbacks were the subject of journalist Nina Munk’s The Idealist (2013), which portrays Sachs as hubristic and closed-minded, refusing to learn from others or his own mistakes. In The Age of Sustainable Development, Sachs seeks to combine his earlier interests in development economics with his more recent environmentalism. The goal is an intellectually rigorous concept of ‘sustainable development.’ Unfortunately, his effort reveals more than the author intends: sustainable development as defined by Sachs is an amalgam of academically fashionable but empirically unsupported notions and preferences.”
