Professor Jeffrey Sachs
He is currently a professor on the faculty at the School of International and Public Affairs and director of the Earth Institute, both at Columbia University. He is also Senior Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. From 2002 to 2006, he was Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Director of the UN Millennium Project.
He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.
He even has a MySpace page.
http://www.myspace.com/sachsonline
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Not surprisingly, those on the left with long memories are somewhat cynical about Sachs' new plans to solve poverty in Africa, although they warmly endorse his appeal to America to devote more money to international aid and less to international warfare: "I hope he gets what he wants, but that he doesn't get any credit for it", commented David Ellerman, in a somewhat sour jibe at Sachs' elemental ego.
His main academic critic in the US, Professor William Easterly of New York University, is similarly dismissive of Sachs' view that the solution to Africa's problems lies principally in an enormous expansion of aid budgets. Easterly, a former development economist at the World Bank, is the author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, cataloguing the corrupt practices which have ensured that almost two-and-a-half trillion dollars of aid have achieved nothing but economic stagnation in Africa.
For 200 years since Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, economists and politicians have continued to make fools of themselves by writing books and delivering lectures prophesying famines and planetary apocalypse, unless we take their advice.