The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  Copyright © 2013 by Nina Munk

  Photographs copyright © 2013 by Guillaume Bonn

  Signal is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of American by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  This book is based on a July 2007 article that appeared in Vanity Fair.

  All photographs are from the author’s personal collection except those taken by Guillaume Bonn.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-6251-3

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph © Malija/Shutterstock

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Linda Munk (1937–2013). As she often said, quoting Henry James: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One

  1. Shock Therapy

  2. Ahmed Maalim Mohamed

  3. The End of Poverty

  Part Two

  4. It Doesn’t Get Harder Than This

  5. Every Problem Has a Solution

  6. Everything Is Written

  7. It Will Be Sweet Like Honey

  Part Three

  8. A Pipe Dream

  9. Complacency and Fear

  Part Four

  10. David Siriri

  11. A Green Revolution

  12. Awaire, Awaire

  13. Capitalist Philanthropy

  Part Five

  14. Setbacks

  15. Insha’Allah

  Part Six

  16. I Am Thinking We Are Not Ready for This

  17. A Very Tall Order

  18. I Have Been Failed by the Markets

  Part Seven

  19. Misinformation and Politics

  20. A Version of Progress

  21. What Mistake Has Ahmed Done?

  Part Eight

  22. An Island of Success

  23. I Cry for Ahmed

  24. It Is What It Is

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  Jeffrey Sachs pointed to the cup of Starbucks coffee in my hand. Before I had a chance to introduce myself, he said, “You know, I’ve done a formal breakdown of what it would cost to fully fund the global prevention of malaria, and it’s two-fifty a year for every American. Two dollars and fifty cents! That’s a single cup of Starbucks coffee.”

  It was September 2006. A year earlier Sachs’s book The End of Poverty had been excerpted on the cover of Time magazine. It also made the New York Times best-seller list. By the time I met Sachs, The End of Poverty had been translated into eighteen languages. I’d come across his name while reporting for Vanity Fair on Bono’s involvement in Africa. Time and again I’d hear references to “Bono’s Guru.” “My name is Bono and I am the rock star student,” to quote Bono’s foreword to The End of Poverty. “The man with me is Jeffrey D. Sachs, the great economist, and for a few years now my professor.”

  Sachs, born in 1954, was fifty-one years old when I first met him, the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University and special adviser to the secretary-general of the United Nations. During the 1980s and 1990s he was nicknamed “Dr. Shock,” the brilliant, controversial macro-economist from Harvard who’d prescribed radical fiscal and monetary discipline, so-called shock therapy, to countries emerging from Communism. He’d also had a distinguished academic career, but with the publication of The End of Poverty, he had become a celebrity. More than 200,000 copies were sold in the United States, an extraordinary feat for a book that can be, truthfully, a slog, with a few charts and graphs for company. He’d also starred in MTV’s documentary The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa. In the movie, Jolie calls him “one of the smartest people in the world.”

  Sachs is very smart. He’s one of those people who can (and does) go on about, say, the shortcomings of covariance matrices, the etymology of Nilo-Saharan languages, the difference between two species of mosquito, Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti, and the effect of “the adiabatic process” on temperatures in the highlands of Kenya. He has an insatiable, unself-conscious fascination with the world in all its complexity. Once, when we were driving past the equator in Uganda, Sachs asked us to stop the car so he could phone his son, Adam, at that time a Harvard undergraduate majoring in earth and planetary science. The purpose of the call? To discuss whether the Coriolis effect influences the direction that water swirls down a drain. (It doesn’t, apparently.)

  What struck me after I’d spent some time with Sachs was his genius for reducing huge and complex issues to their essence. Above all, it’s his ability to synthesize, to turn ideas into bullet points, that has allowed him to move the issue of global poverty into the mainstream. He has convinced the developed world to consider his utopian thesis: that with enough focus, enough determination, and enough money, we can “end the suffering of those still trapped by poverty.” In fact, from Sachs’s point of view, the problem can be solved by 2025, and it can be solved “easily.”

  In his mind, the most stubborn problem becomes as easy to grasp as a $2.50 cup of Starbucks coffee. With the right approach, anything is possible; he’s sure of that. Malaria can be prevented with the widespread use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets. The problem of hunger can be solved with subsidized fertilizers and high-yield seeds. Universal education can be achieved by eliminating primary school fees. “We have enough on the planet to make sure, easily, that people aren’t dying of their poverty,” he assured me. “That’s the basic truth.”

  In his speeches, Sachs presents his audience with an ethical choice that is no choice: “Either you decide to leave people to die or you decide to do something about it.” Who can resist Sachs’s call to action? After all, two billion people on the planet are scraping by, barely, on less than a dollar or two a day. Industrialization has passed them by. They have not been lifted out of poverty by what proponents of free markets like to call “the rising tide” (the tide that lifts some boats but not all of them). Trapped by disease, hunger, physical isolation, dysfunctional governments, environmental degradation, and, as Sachs argues, poverty itself, their life expectancy hovers around fifty.

  In most of sub-Saharan Africa, per capita income is so low it looks like a misprint. In Malawi, for example, per capita income, adjusted for purchasing power, is $870 a year. In Tanzania, $1,510 a year. “The countries at the bottom coexist with the twenty-first century, but their reality is the fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance,” to quote the economist Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion.

  The bare truth is, for all the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on foreign aid in the past decades, no one has come close to ending poverty in Africa. Development experts keep publishing books and articles promoting one theory after another, but so far there’s
been no workable solution. If Jeffrey Sachs, one of the greatest macroeconomists of his generation, believed he had the answer to poverty, I was eager to hear him out.

  But the more time I spent with Sachs, the more questions I had. Are we really at a defining moment in history, as he imagines? Can extreme poverty—one of the great unsolved problems of our time, a condition as old as human society itself—be eradicated? In remote African villages, where there are no roads or power or running water, and where most people are illiterate, how does sustainable economic development take hold? Can people be lifted out of poverty, as Sachs puts it, or do they have to lift themselves? To embrace his view of the world requires courage and conviction. Call it idealism, if you’d like, or faith.

  “Have you seen children dying?” Sachs challenged his audience, using rhetorical shock therapy. I’d followed him to Montreal to attend an all-day conference on poverty. He was wearing a blue oxford-cloth shirt and khakis. His head seemed too large for his slight frame, and characteristically, he was badly shaven. His deep midwestern voice was resonant, compelling; he spoke for almost an hour without notes. Projected onto a giant screen just above his head was a photograph he’d taken a few months earlier in Malawi, at Zomba Central Hospital. Covered by thin sarongs, small children in malaria comas were lying on the bare floor, row after row, their yellow eyes rolled back.

  “I never thought in the twenty-first century, growing up in the twentieth century, I’d ever see that,” Sachs exclaimed, outraged by the shortsightedness implicit in the photograph. “Lack of a bed net. Lack of a dollar medicine. Lack of an oral rehydration solution in time to save a child dehydrated from a diarrheal infection. Lack of antibiotics to cure a child of acute lower respiratory infection contracted from living in a hut where dung is burned to cook the meals in a smoke-filled chamber.”

  He went on: “Lack of a five-cent immunization, so that you have hundreds of thousands of children dying of vaccine-preventable diseases. Half a million mothers dying in childbirth because there’s no obstetrician or even emergency care to stop the hemorrhaging, to deliver a child in breech, to do a C-section. The most straightforward things that we’ve known how to do for centuries.”

  To dismiss Africa as a lost cause offers an easy excuse for doing nothing—about malaria, preventable diseases, mothers dying in childbirth, infant mortality, hunger, and smoke-filled huts. For Jeffrey Sachs, the solutions to such injustices are obvious. His one question is, How long will it take the rest of us to come around?

  Part One

  Maybe it’s having had the good experience of hearing, as I have many, many times, “Impossible, impossible, impossible, impossible, impossible—obvious.” If you’ve gone through that over a period of twenty-five years, it helps you to filter out a lot of what you’re told. Everything seems impossible until it becomes inevitable.

  —Jeffrey Sachs

  Chapter 1

  Shock Therapy

  As a young child growing up in Oak Park, Michigan (“The City with a Future”), Jeffrey David Sachs displayed a preternaturally brilliant mind. At twelve or thirteen years of age, in middle school, he won a mathematics contest for gifted children, with the result that he spent the summer taking college-level math courses at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. As a teenager, he was single-minded, ambitious, and from all reports, unusually self-disciplined. He played in adult tournaments at the local bridge club. Once, not uncharacteristically, when a high school teacher assigned a five-page essay, Sachs handed in forty pages. “He never had a rebellious day in his life,” according to his sister, Andrea Sachs.

  At Oak Park High School, Jeffrey Sachs was elected president of the student council. In his senior year, he got near-perfect scores on his SATs. Unsurprisingly, he was named class valedictorian when he graduated in 1972. Nothing less was expected of him. “His father was extremely bright and was top of his class,” said his mother, Joan. “We just assumed our children would be the same.”

  Sachs’s father, Theodore, was a legend in Detroit. A labor and constitutional lawyer who successfully argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Ted Sachs was said to have one of his generation’s finest legal minds. He was stunning in the courtroom and was admired for his commitment to social justice. While arguing his most important case before the Supreme Court, Scholle v. Hare, Ted Sachs helped establish the principle of “one man, one vote” for legislative apportionment. “Sachs not only fought against precedent but against legal inertia,” according to a 1962 Detroit News article about his victory in the case: “Sachs seems to have anticipated history, sensed impending change in the attitude of the courts, and to have worked industriously for a cause that more experienced lawyers long ago had abandoned.”

  It was taken for granted that Jeffrey Sachs would attend his father’s alma mater, the University of Michigan, and that he too would become a lawyer. In the worst case, his family imagined, he’d become a medical doctor. Instead, when he was seventeen years old, he left Oak Park to study economics at Harvard University.

  Martin Feldstein, the well-known economist and a longtime professor at Harvard, remembers meeting Sachs for the first time. “I was teaching the graduate macroeconomics course,” he recalled. “And he came along—remember, he’s a second-year undergraduate, so he’s about nineteen years old—and he says ‘Well, I’d like to take your course.’ ” Warning Sachs that he was an unforgiving and demanding teacher, Feldstein discouraged him and advised the young man to stay away from trouble. “I’ll take my chances,” replied Sachs.

  Sachs received an A in Feldstein’s class. “He was one of the very best performers in a course where he was competing with the best graduate students in the country,” said Feldstein. “It was clear from that point that this was a very unusually talented young man.”

  On earning his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, from Harvard in 1976, Sachs was ranked third in his class of 1,650 students. During his graduate studies at Harvard, which he completed in record time, he was elected a Harvard Junior Fellow, an honor reserved for “persons of exceptional ability, originality, and resourcefulness, and … the highest calibre of intellectual achievement.” A scant three years after being awarded his Ph.D. in economics, with a focus on international macroeconomics, Sachs was granted tenure and made a full professor at Harvard. It was 1983, and he was twenty-eight years old.

  It was at Harvard, at a screening of The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophüls’s four-hour documentary about life in France during the Nazi occupation, that he met his future wife, Sonia Ehrlich. “In the beginning, Jeff would say, ‘Wait until I finish my undergrad thesis,’ ” Ehrlich said, describing her husband’s single-mindedness. “Then it was ‘Wait until I get my Ph.D. thesis’ and ‘Wait until I get tenured.’ Then it was ‘Wait until I finish my first book.’ Then Bolivia came up.”

  In July 1985, when he was thirty years old, Jeffrey Sachs was invited to the Andean mountains of La Paz, Bolivia, to act as an adviser to the country’s president, Victor Paz. Desperately poor and chaotic, Bolivia, with its annualized inflation rate of 25,000 percent, was spiraling out of control. Among other problems, the country was spending far more than it could afford. To finance such runaway spending, the government kept printing more and more pesos; the more pesos it printed, the more worthless its currency became. Bolivia was a textbook case of hyperinflation, the likes of which no one had seen since the early 1920s, in Germany’s Weimar republic.

  Sachs had never worked outside academe. Nevertheless, as Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was then Bolivia’s president of the Senate and the nation’s official economic adviser, explained, Sachs had a rare skill for translating theory into practice, a talent for explaining and selling his ideas to people who knew nothing about economics. “I was twenty-five years older than he was, and our president was eighty years old,” recalled Sánchez de Lozada, “but Jeff always seemed to be an equal because he was very forceful, and very convincing, and he just made a lot of sense.”

&nb
sp; Consulting studies of hyperinflation and drawing on his academic training, Sachs designed a radical austerity plan to jump-start Bolivia. It called for huge cuts in government spending, massive layoffs of state employees, the end of fixed gasoline prices, a complete overhaul of the tax system, and above all, an abrupt shift to a free-market-based economy. With the country in disarray, the government of Bolivia agreed to follow Sachs’s advice. It had few other options. “We couldn’t get any support from the International Monetary Fund, or the World Bank, or the U.S. government, or anybody, because we’d been written off as a basket case,” said Sánchez de Lozada. “We were in the hands of Jeff Sachs.”

  Sachs’s plan for Bolivia was pragmatic and impersonal—hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, their pensions, their dignity—and yet the plan worked, at least in the short term: strict fiscal and monetary discipline managed to lower the country’s annual inflation rate to about 15 percent. “Shock therapy,” as the approach was later called, was to become Sachs’s trademark.

  From Bolivia, Sachs went on to Poland. It was 1989, and the Berlin Wall had just come down. With the abrupt collapse of Communist rule, Eastern Europe was in chaos. In Poland, where the new Solidarity government had taken over, the economy included black markets, soaring prices, an extreme shortage of goods, and a worthless currency.

  George Soros, whose foundations promoted the transition to democratic market economies in Central and Eastern Europe, arranged for Sachs and his former student David Lipton to meet Jacek Kuroń, the Polish intellectual known as “the brains behind Solidarity.” Sachs’s description of that meeting is one of the more remarkable passages in The End of Poverty. No one doubted Sachs’s intelligence; what became obvious in Poland, however, was his supreme self-confidence.