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This book looks at Sachs from a left-wing lens but it still has a lot of useful information on tracking his long-term activity:

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https://www.amazon.com/Jeffrey-Sachs-Strange-Shock-Counterblasts/dp/1781683298

Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid (Counterblasts) Paperback – April 15, 2014
by Japhy Wilson (Author)

An investigation of Sachs’s schizophrenic career, and the worldwide havoc he has caused.

Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A celebrated economist and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he is also no stranger to the world of celebrity, accompanying Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa. Once notorious as the progenitor of a brutal form of free market engineering called ‘shock therapy’, Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, condemning the ‘1 per cent’ and promoting his solution to extreme poverty through the Millennium Villages Project.

Appearances can be deceiving. Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid is the story of an evangelical development expert who poses as saviour of the Third World while opening vulnerable nations to economic exploitation. Based on documentary research and on-the-ground investigation, Jeffrey Sachs exposes Mr Aid as no more than a new, more human face of Dr Shock.

Top Reviews from the United States

3.0 out of 5 stars Jeffrey Sachs provided disatrous economic shock therapy in Russia, then sought rehabilitation by championing aid to Africa
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2017
Verified Purchase
This book is from the undisguisedly partisan Verso Counterblasts series said to be “challenging the apologists of empire and capital” that also targets Bono, Thomas Friedman, and others. The author, who is not an admirer, divides Jeffrey Sachs’s career into two portions. In the first portion Sachs is a Harvard professor delivering neo-liberal economic shock therapy to Latin America, countries of the former Soviet Empire, and finally Russia. In the second portion he is a Columbia professor championing aid to poor African nations and denying his earlier association with neo-liberalism and his responsibility for the devastating effects of earlier shock therapy, particularly for Russia.

Shock therapy was devised by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics to spread neo-liberal economics (market fundamentalism) around the world. It was antidemocratic in that it exploited a major crisis, such as a major economic collapse or fall of government, to rapidly impose extreme neo-liberal economic reforms without public debate before the population was able to organize against the harsh realities to follow. The four pillars of the neoliberal project were free trade, deregulation, privatization, and austerity. In developing nations, implementation included crushing labor unions and ending protection for native industries with resultant increasing unemployment, falling standards of living, and increasing inequality. Considerable coercion was required for the antidemocratic imposition of these reforms when their draconian consequences inevitably encountered strong popular resistance. This took the form of years of assassinations and torture in Pinochet’s Chile, organized disappearance of 30,000 opponents in Argentina, and violent overthrow of the democratically-elected parliament in Yeltsin’s Russia. Most of this violence was directed against workers and peasants who objected to harsh shock therapy rather than against communist revolutionaries as claimed by state propaganda.

As a thirty-year-old Harvard professor, Jeffrey Sachs began his career as a shock therapist in Bolivia in 1985. The crisis of hyperinflation was used as a rationale for imposing the entire neo-liberal reform package. Hyperinflation was tamed, but with severe social consequences that included increased unemployment from 20% to 30%, decreased real wages by 40%, and significantly increased poverty and inequality. Nevertheless, these results earned the approval of the neo-liberal IMF, and Sachs went on to advise the Latin American governments of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela. In 1989, the transition from communism to democracy provided Sachs with the opportunity to bring neo-liberal shock therapy to Poland. Ironically, the government by Solidarity, the workers’ party, implemented the fundamentally anti-worker changes. By 1993, industrial production was down by 30%, unemployment, which had been nonexistent, was up to 25% in some areas, and poverty and inequality were dramatically increased. Fortunately for Poland, enough democracy remained so that even Solidarity and Lech Walesa were defeated in elections and the neo-liberal policies were discontinued. Nevertheless, Sachs’s experiment was once again celebrated in the corridors of global power, and he went on to advise countries throughout the post-communist world from Slovenia to Mongolia.

Sachs reached the pinnacle of this phase of his career in 1991 when he was invited to Russia to serve as economic advisor to President Yeltsin. Although Sachs was unable to acquire the debt restructuring and the aid he though necessary from Washington and the IMF, the entire package of neo-liberal reforms was deployed in an atmosphere of government crisis without popular support. Indeed, Yeltsin got parliament to award him the right to govern by decree for one year while instituting the reforms. However, the consequences of these reforms were so disastrous that parliament withdrew its support. Yeltsin responded by illegally suspending parliament and attacking its building with tanks, then operated for the next three months as an unlimited dictatorship to force through further neo-liberal reforms. Finally, the December 1993 parliamentary elections demolished the party of the prime minister, and the new prime minister announced that “the era of market romanticism [was] over.” Sachs’s time at his pinnacle was also over. He resigned in January, 1994.

The economic crisis induced by shock therapy in Russia has been described as the longest and deepest recession in recorded human history. Between 1991 and 1998, GDP declined by 43%; industrial production fell by 56%; capital investment fell by 78%; 80% of firms went bankrupt; 70,000 factories closed with massively increased unemployment; food production fell by half; living standards dropped by half; people living in poverty increased from 2 million to 74 million; suicides doubled; deaths from alcoholism tripled; and life expectancy lost 5 years. What emerged was not a vibrant commercial society, but a brutal class system of vertiginous inequality, in which notorious oligarchs and their cronies were utilizing the power of the state to appropriate natural resources and asset-strip public companies.

According to the author, the next phase in Sachs’s career was the transformation from Dr. Shock to Mr. Aid as noted in the book’s title. This consisted of efforts to rehabilitate his reputation by denying responsibility for the Russian catastrophe, distancing himself from neo-liberalism, and advocating aid for the impoverished in Africa and elsewhere. In 2002 he left Harvard to head the Earth Institute at Columbia University with an annual budget of $87 million to focus on sustainable development. That same year he was appointed by Kofi Annan to chair the UN Millennium Project for which funding was delayed. In 2006, he launched the Millennium Villages Project, an ambitious development program with funds from multiple sources, to combat poverty for 500,000 Africans in 83 villages of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda.

In the final portion of the book, the author attempts to rebut evidence for Sachs’s transformation and for Sachs’s claim that his earlier role had been mischaracterized. Many examples are provided for earlier statements by Sachs strongly advocating neo-liberal policies in Bolivia, Poland, and Russia that are denied in his later statements. His responsibility in Russia is mitigated somewhat by the failure of Washington and the IMF to provide necessary aid and debt restructuring. For the second phase of Sachs’s career, the author notes challenges to Sachs’s claims for success of the Millennium Villages Project, particularly the lack of comparison to control villages to document the significance of any changes.

The author presents Sachs’s later representation of himself as a critic of libertarianism and the free market fallacy and as identifying with the social democracies of northern Europe as misleading. He reports that Sachs never advocates collective action or the strengthening of unions and that his loyalty continues to lie firmly with the capitalist class and the defense of its privilege. He reports that Sachs insists that deficit cutting should start now and that suffering from austerity is not an anomaly but an adjustment to be accepted. He maintains that Sachs’s strategy of population control, technical fixes, and market-based solutions and his endorsement of the existing distribution of wealth and power is entirely in conformity with the agenda of today’s ruling classes.These are the author’s conclusions.

On the other hand, the author appears to distain even the more humane mixed economy variety of capitalism that prevailed until the rise of Chicago School neoliberalism forty years ago. And Sachs does lead a large organization pursuing sustainable development and has mobilized considerable funding to fight third world poverty. In my view, the reader needs to pursue multiple other sources before deciding whether the present Mr. Aid Sachs has sincerely distanced himself from the shock therapy of the earlier Dr. Shock Sachs.

As we all know, just because someone posts something on X/Twitter that does not make it true. Due diligence to verify claims is in order, same as for our (highly!) unreliable MSM.

It’s only to be expected that the lefty warmongers would go all out to discredit Sachs, especially among Trump supporters, and as best I can tell, these nasty allegations originated with The Blob. No surprise there!

There are a number of replies on that thread refuting claims made by “Insurrection Barbie”. I’ve not yet looked at them all, but so far, the refutations are pretty solid.

Yes, Sachs has written about migration. In his writings he has concentrated on mitigating the root causes of migration (a good thing, right?) and also on ways to limit migration to manageable levels. One of those replying asked Grok “Did Jeffrey Sachs do any white papers on mass migration?” And Grok replied:

Yes, Jeffrey Sachs has authored white papers and similar works addressing mass migration, often framing it within broader economic, ethical, and policy contexts. While not all of his writings are labeled strictly as “white papers” in the formal sense (e.g., government or organizational policy documents), his academic articles, books, and essays serve a similar purpose by providing in-depth analysis and recommendations. Below are some key examples of his work related to mass migration:

1. “Toward an International Migration Regime” (2016)
Published in the American Economic Review (Vol. 106, No. 5, pp. 451-455), this paper explores the need for a global framework to manage international migration. Sachs argues that the absence of a coherent international regime—beyond refugee policies—leaves migration policies muddled and contentious. He proposes economic and ethical principles to guide such a regime, emphasizing sustainable development and moderated migration flows. This work directly engages with mass migration as a global phenomenon requiring structured governance.

2. “A Three-Point Solution to the Migrant Crisis” (2016)
Published on his personal website (jeffsachs.org) and adapted from various columns, this piece outlines a practical approach to addressing mass migration. Sachs suggests stopping conflicts driving refugee flows (e.g., in the Middle East and Central America), promoting long-term economic development in source countries, and adjusting global policies to balance the human right to migrate with manageable limits. While more of an essay than a traditional white paper, it offers a policy-oriented analysis of mass migration’s root causes and solutions.

3. “The Drivers of Migration” (2022)
This chapter, featured in Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (Columbia University Press, pp. 229-234), examines the forces behind mass migration, including conflict, poverty, and climate change. Sachs connects these drivers to sustainable development goals, advocating for global cooperation to mitigate the conditions that compel large-scale movement. Its academic tone and focus on actionable insights align with white paper characteristics.

4. Broader Works with Migration Themes
Sachs’s books, such as A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018) and The Ages of Globalization (2020), also touch on mass migration. In A New Foreign Policy, he critiques U.S. militarism as a driver of displacement and calls for sustainable development to reduce migration pressures. In The Ages of Globalization, he traces migration as a constant in human history, intensified by modern economic and environmental factors. These works aren’t white papers per se but provide scholarly grounding for his migration-related arguments.

Sachs’s writings consistently frame mass migration as a symptom of deeper systemic issues—war, inequality, and climate change—rather than an isolated problem. His approach contrasts with purely restrictive policies, favoring global cooperation and development-focused solutions. While claims like those on X suggesting he’s “the brainchild behind the mass migration scheme” in the U.S. since 2010 exaggerate his influence (no single individual orchestrates U.S. migration policy), his advocacy for structured migration regimes and development aid has undeniably shaped academic and policy discussions on the topic.

These works are publicly accessible through academic journals, his website, or book purchases, though specific institutional affiliations (e.g., advisory roles) might amplify their reach rather than directly implement them as policy. If you’re looking for a specific white paper tied to a particular organization or date, let me know, and I can refine the search!

So far, it seems his only real connection to INET and Soros is INET funding for Sach’s MVP project to alleviate poverty in African villages in 2006. While “sustainable development” is often a derided phrase and concept here on FR — and often rightly so, as it has been hijacked by the left to mean something entirely different from its original meaning/concept — it appears to me that Sachs believes in the original concept. That is: programs and policies that promote the ability of impoverished peoples to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to create an economy that provides a decent living into the future rather than relying on handouts from richer nations/areas. In other Words, the opposite of the old bandaid approach.

As it affects migration, the original concept of sustainable development is aimed at creating conditions that keep people in their original homelands with a means of decent living standards and faith in the future rather than fleeing in desperation to richer countries.

As for the charges that he backs NGOs that promote mass illegal migration, no evidence has so far emerged that he has had any such connections. His emphasis seems to have been on creating conditions in source countries that mitigate migration and formulating policies in host countries for legal migration within those host countries’ desired and manageable limits. I don’t see the problem there. Do you?

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