55 Facts About Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst who is a professor at Columbia University, where he was formerly director of The Earth Institute.

Jeffrey Sachs worked on the topics of sustainable development and economic development.

Jeffrey Sachs is an SDG Advocate for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 global goals adopted at a UN summit meeting in September 2015.

From 2001 to 2018, Jeffrey Sachs was special advisor to the UN Secretary General, and held the same position under the previous UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and prior to 2016 a similar advisory position related to the earlier Millennium Development Goals, eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger and disease by 2015.

Jeffrey Sachs is co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger.

Jeffrey Sachs was raised in Oak Park, Michigan, in the Detroit metro area, and is the son of Joan and Theodore Jeffrey Sachs, a labor lawyer.

In 1980, Jeffrey Sachs joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 1982.

Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

From 2002 to 2016, Jeffrey Sachs was director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, a university-wide organization, with an interdisciplinary approach to addressing complex issues facing the Earth, in support of sustainable development.

Jeffrey Sachs's classes are taught at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Mailman School of Public Health, and his course "Challenges of Sustainable Development" is taught at the undergraduate level.

In 1989, Jeffrey Sachs advised Poland's anticommunist Solidarity movement and the government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

Jeffrey Sachs wrote a comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market economy which became incorporated into Poland's reform program led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz.

Jeffrey Sachs was the main architect of Poland's debt reduction operation.

In Poland, Jeffrey Sachs was firmly on the side of rapid transition to capitalism.

Jeffrey Sachs received an honorary doctorate from the Krakow University of Economics.

Jeffrey Sachs faced criticism for his role after the Russian economy faced significant struggles after adopting the market-based shock therapy in the early 1990s.

Jeffrey Sachs has written extensively on climate change, disease control and globalization.

Jeffrey Sachs has said that a key element to accomplishing this is raising aid from $65 billion in 2002 to $195 billion a year by 2015.

Jeffrey Sachs emphasizes the role of geography and climate as much of Africa is landlocked and disease-prone.

Jeffrey Sachs suggests that with improved seeds, irrigation and fertilizer, the crop yields in Africa and other places with subsistence farming can be increased from 1 ton per hectare to 3 to 5 tons per hectare.

Jeffrey Sachs said that increased harvests would significantly increase the income of subsistence farmers, thereby reducing poverty.

Jeffrey Sachs supports establishing credit and microloan programs which are often lacking in impoverished areas.

Jeffrey Sachs estimates that malaria can be controlled for $3 billion per year, therefore suggesting that anti-malaria projects would be an economically justified investment.

Jeffrey Sachs is founding editor of the World Happiness Report.

Previously a special adviser to secretary-general Antonio Guterres, Jeffrey Sachs is an advocate for the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals which build upon and supersede the MDGs.

Jeffrey Sachs was photographed with Matt Damon and developed a friendship with international celebrities Bono and Angelina Jolie, who traveled to Africa with Sachs to witness the progress of the Millennium Villages.

Jeffrey Sachs has criticized the International Monetary Fund and its policies around the world and blamed international bankers for what he says is a pattern of ineffective investment strategies.

Jeffrey Sachs is one of the founders of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project.

In 2012 Jeffrey Sachs stated that nuclear power is the only solution to climate change.

Jeffrey Sachs has argued for closer relations between the US and China and warned of the danger of tensions between them.

Jeffrey Sachs set up a number of task forces, including one on the origins of the virus.

Jeffrey Sachs appointed British American disease ecologist Peter Daszak, a colleague of Jeffrey Sachs's at Columbia, to head this task force, two weeks after the Trump administration prematurely ended a federal grant supporting a project led by Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Jeffrey Sachs later came to believe that Daszak had a conflict of interest due to his connections to the Wuhan lab and the nature of the lab's research.

Daszak left as chair of the taskforce in June 2021 and Jeffrey Sachs disbanded the group in September that year.

Jeffrey Sachs has suggested that the US was responsible for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.

Jeffrey Sachs wrote that none of the executives of several US companies which had been fined for sanctions violations were arrested.

Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at Asia Society, wrote that Jeffrey Sachs had written a foreword to a Huawei position paper, and asked if Jeffrey Sachs had been paid by Huawei.

In June 2020, Jeffrey Sachs said the targeting of Huawei by the US was not solely about security.

The letter's signatories wrote that Jeffrey Sachs took the same stance as China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a digression to the history of US rights violations as a way to avoid discussions of China's mistreatment of Uyghurs.

The rights groups went on to say that Jeffrey Sachs "betrayed his institution's mission" by trivializing the perspective of those who were oppressed by the Chinese government.

Stephan Richter, editor-in-chief at The Globalist, and JD Bindenagel, a former US ambassador, wrote that Jeffrey Sachs was "actively agitating for a classic Communist propaganda ploy".

In 2004 and 2005, Jeffrey Sachs was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time.

Jeffrey Sachs was named one of the "500 Most Influential People in the Field of Foreign Policy" by the World Affairs Councils of America.

In 2007, Sachs received the S Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

From 2000 to 2001, Jeffrey Sachs was chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization and from 1999 to 2000 he was a member of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission established by the United States Congress.

Jeffrey Sachs has been an adviser to the WHO, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Development Program.

Jeffrey Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, the Fellows of the World Econometric Society, the Brookings Panel of Economists, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Board of Advisers of the Chinese Economists Society, among other international organizations.

Jeffrey Sachs holds an honorary professorship at the Universidad del Pacifico in Peru.

Jeffrey Sachs has lectured at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford and Yale University and in Tel Aviv University and Jakarta.

In July 2009, Jeffrey Sachs became a member of the Netherlands Development Organization's International Advisory Board.

In 2016, Jeffrey Sachs became president of the Eastern Economic Association, succeeding Janet Currie.

In 2015, Jeffrey Sachs was awarded the Blue Planet Prize for his contributions to solving global environmental problems.

In May 2017 Jeffrey Sachs was awarded the Boris Mints Institute Prize for Research of Strategic Policy Solutions to Global Challenges.

In 2022 Jeffrey Sachs was awarded the Tang Prize in the category of sustainable development.

Jeffrey Sachs writes a monthly foreign affairs column for Project Syndicate, a nonprofit association of newspapers around the world that is circulated in 145 countries.