Chris Blattman

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On Economics for a Crowded Planet

Tyler Cowen reacts to Jeff Sachs’ new book Common Wealth:

It promotes resource pessimism, Nordic-style social democracy, foreign aid, and a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy. Most of all it expresses a faith in global cooperation. Sachs is very smart and, though I do not agree with him, there is often more to his views than his critics admit. But my browsing of this book never gave me the feeling that I had access to the mind of Jeffrey Sachs. Imagine a smart and diligent but not insightful or self-reflective person doing a “color by numbers” version of what a Jeffrey Sachs book should read like.

To Marxist thinkers, there is the vulgar Marx of the Communist Manifesto, and the real, more subtle Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Perhaps Cowen is right, and Common Wealth is simply the vulgar Sachs? I think so, but have never been sure.

In graduate school I spent a semester as his TA for a course on development–one that preceded The End of Poverty by a couple of years. We saw a slightly more subtle view in lectures, and I saw hints of much more, and I always regretted not being able to get deeper.

The meetings we had always concerned class matters, and the handful of times I thought I had time to get deeper into the lecture material, our meetings were interrupted by phone calls from the Pope and Bono.

They were for Jeff.

I guess I’ll have to wait for his Eigthteenth Brumaire

2 Responses

  1. “And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.” G. Orwell

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