The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  Kuroń sat at a crowded desk in a room filled with books piled high on the table and everywhere else. He took out the first of many packs of cigarettes that he would smoke that evening, and a bottle of alcohol.… He smiled and said, “Okay, so why are you here?”

  “Well, I was asked to see you to talk about how Poland can get out of this mess.”

  “Okay, then,” he replied …, “what do you say?”

  I started weaving a story about what economic reforms in Poland might really mean. I said that Poland needed to become a “normal” country again with a “normal” economy.… I continued to improvise, sketching out an economic strategy for Poland’s return to Europe, drawing a bit on my experience in Bolivia, since that country had “returned” to the world economy after decades of self-imposed protectionism. I also compared Poland’s situation with that of Spain’s and Portugal’s in the 1970s, after their long periods of military rule under Franco and Salazar, respectively.…

  Every couple of minutes Kuroń would hit the table and say, Tak, rozumiem! Tak, rozumiem!—“Yes, I understand! Yes, I understand!” Smoke was filling the room, and the bottle kept pouring. I talked and talked, probably for another three or four hours. I was drenched in sweat. I do not know how many packs of cigarettes he smoked that night, each stub being crushed into an ever filling ashtray. At the end of the evening, he said, “Okay, I understand this. We’ll do it. Write a plan.”

  I thought to myself, “This is exciting. He liked the ideas.” I said, “Mr. Kuroń, we will go home and fax you something within a week or two about these ideas.” He hit the table. “No! We need the plan now.” I said, “What do you mean?” “I need this tomorrow morning.”

  It was midnight when Sachs left Kuroń’s apartment. Borrowing an old computer at the offices of Gazeta Wyborcza, the Solidarity newspaper, Sachs and Lipton worked until dawn. They wrote a fifteen-page, single-spaced memo (“Summary of the Proposed Economic Program of Solidarity”) advising the new government how to jolt Poland out of socialism and into a market economy. “This strategy can be called a ‘shock’ approach to Poland’s economic crisis, in contrast to the [current] muddling-along approach of the Coalition Government,” begins the memo.

  Page after page, Sachs and Lipton outlined “the nuts and bolts of stabilization.” Their plan was straightforward—an updated version of the model Sachs had developed for Bolivia: a convertible hard currency, a stock exchange, a commercial banking sector, the privatization of state enterprise, the end of state subsidies and central planning, a brand-new tax code, the free exchange of goods, the recognition of private property, a balanced state budget …

  “One of the most spectacular and spectacularly risky macroeconomic experiments ever undertaken,” is how the so-called Sachs Plan was described by Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for The New Yorker and an expert on Poland’s Solidarity movement. Many informed Poles agreed with Weschler’s assessment. “Polish shock therapy has been described as a dive off a high tower without knowing if there was any water in the pool,” said Maciej Kozlowski, a Polish diplomat and historian. “Jeff Sachs was the one assuring us that there was water in the pool.”

  While acknowledging that the “shock program will cause disruptions in the short run and no doubt pain for some in the society,” Sachs and Lipton argued that the country had no choice. For Poland to follow a path of moderate, gradual change would be a “pure, unmitigated disaster,” predicted Sachs. “In any event,” concluded his and Lipton’s memo, “there is no viable alternative. Unless Poland jumps to a market economy, the current misery and chaos will surely continue.”

  In an interview with Weschler, Sachs compared himself to a trauma doctor who arrives in the nick of time to resuscitate the patient. “Look, when a guy comes into the emergency room and his heart’s stopped,” he said, “you just rip open the sternum and don’t worry about the scars that you leave. The idea is to get the guy’s heart beating again. And you make a bloody mess. But you don’t have any choice.”

  When the Sachs Plan was finally implemented in Poland, it followed the authors’ road map and timetable almost to the letter. Sachs, now thirty-five, had become an international star in policy circles—a “wunderkind,” the media liked to call him. Widely considered one of the most promising economists of his generation, he was presented with the 1991 Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy. Some people considered him the most influential economist since John Maynard Keynes. He was a “virtuoso,” according to The New York Times: along with two other young and ambitious Harvard-trained economists, Paul Krugman and Lawrence (“Larry”) Summers, Jeffrey Sachs was one of the “three whiz kid economists of the 90’s.” The New York Times Magazine went even further, referring to Sachs as “probably the most important economist in the world.”

  Not everyone agreed. Increasingly, in academic circles, at least, Sachs was being written off as an exhibitionist, a show-off. “He was clearly capable of doing pretty important work, but I don’t think he did it,” the influential Harvard economist Robert Barro told a reporter in 1991. More recently, when I interviewed him, Barro elaborated: “I mean, Jeff had some good articles, but he didn’t have stuff that was of real permanence and brilliance. Nothing that matches the potential he had when he was, say, twenty-eight.”

  Throughout the 1990s, Sachs was still a professor at Harvard, lecturing to students and writing papers and books at an astonishing pace, but academia was starting to bore him. It was parochial, inbred. Whereas advising world leaders, shaping a nation’s economic policy, changing the course of history—that was intoxicating. “My colleagues, they’d say, ‘Well, it’s great what you’re doing, but you should focus on your work.’ And I said, ‘But this is my work,’ ” Sachs recalled. “I would have been perfectly comfortable as an academic at Harvard if I hadn’t seen what was actually happening in the world.”

  In the early 1990s, at the invitation of Boris Yeltsin, Sachs intended to straighten out Russia’s economy. He found himself at the Kremlin on the very day that Yeltsin announced the end of the Soviet Union. “I said, ‘Gee, you know, this is once in a century,’ ” Sachs recalled. “ ‘This is the most incredible thing you can imagine; this is a true liberation; let’s help these people.’ ”

  Together with a dozen colleagues from the Harvard Institute for International Development, he settled into an office at Moscow’s Ministry of Finance and got to work. Characteristically, his approach to Russia’s economy was defined by a combination of optimism and impatience. “If Poland can do it, so can Russia,” he declared.

  Broadly speaking, Sachs’s plan for Russia mirrored his plan for Poland: it was shock therapy writ large. “As a broad measure,” he explained at the time, “the Soviet republics should also follow the three pillars of privatization, liberalization, and stabilization. The ruble, like the Polish zloty, could become a convertible currency within months. Almost no Russian economist believes that, but they’re wrong. It was not believed in Poland either. They can create a working monetary system, they can create the normalcy of markets, free prices and supply and demand. The basic strategy can work.”

  In hindsight, Sachs was naïve. For one thing, he’d underestimated the extent of the problem. He’d misread it. Presuming that his program of economic reform could be imposed on Russia as easily as it had been imposed on Bolivia and Poland, he was defeated by a massively bloated and corrupt economy. In one decade, between 1989 and 1999, Russia’s GDP dropped by half. State assets were systematically looted, and anything of value—raw materials, for instance—wound up in the hands of a few clever men.

  In a scathing 1999 speech, delivered when he was chief economist for the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz argued that the failure of reform in Russia was due to “a misunderstanding of the very foundations of a market economy”; “a failure to grasp the fundamentals of reform processes”; and “an excessive reliance on textbook models of economics.” Sachs wasn’t mentioned by name, but he didn’t have to be. “Not surpri
singly,” said Stiglitz, “those who advocated shock therapy and rapid privatization argue that the problem was … that there was too little shock. The reforms were not pursued aggressively enough. The medicine was right; it was only that the patient failed to follow the doctor’s orders!”

  In fact, concluded Stiglitz, alluding to Sachs obliquely, “Those advocating shock therapy, with its focus on privatization, failed because they failed to understand modern capitalism; they were overly influenced by the excessively simplistic textbook models of the market economy.”

  Years after the fact, when I questioned Sachs about his failure to reform the Russian economy, he became defensive, prickly, like a hedgehog. “Do I consider Russia a failure of the West? Yes, definitely. Do I consider it a personal failure? No! I find that absolutely preposterous!” he insisted. He’d been blindsided, I inferred, or else his timing was off, or he’d been undermined. “I don’t understand why somebody doesn’t ask Robert Rubin, or ask Dick Cheney, or ask Larry Summers, or ask anybody who actually had power at the time about it.” He was fed up with my questions about Russia: “It’s preposterous by now, and tired. And it’s tiresome, and it’s a tired question, and it’s absolutely absurd.” With that, he stood up and walked out of the room.

  Later, in a long e-mail, he took the same tack: “I took a ridiculous amount of criticism for Russia, even though I was not the adviser, not empowered, and my ideas were not adopted. The true actors in this case—the Bush Sr. Administration (especially Cheney), the Clinton Administration (Rubin, Summers, others), the IMF, and others—got a free walk. Ridiculous. I constantly warned that we should be doing more and [doing it] differently. Nobody wanted to hear it.” His failure to resuscitate Russia was due, he explained, to “the triumph of politics over economics.” In other words, no one followed his advice.

  Jeffrey Sachs’s crusade to eradicate extreme poverty began in 1995, when, for the first time, he traveled to sub-Saharan Africa. “I was asked to visit Zambia,” he said, “and that was the first place I really saw AIDS, and the first place where I really saw malaria, and the first place where I really started asking myself, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I hadn’t realized that we were leaving so many millions of people to die every year. I had no idea.”

  Africa was being ravaged by fast-moving epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Everywhere on the continent, health care systems—exhausted, chronically underfunded—had collapsed. There were severe shortages of doctors and nurses, of medicines, even of such basic supplies as surgical gloves and IV fluids. Sachs was outraged. “I really had this sense that things were spinning out of control,” he continued. “I’d say, ‘What do you mean he just died last week? Did he go to the doctor?’ And they’d say, ‘No, no, no, people don’t go to the doctor here.’ What do you mean? What about the medicine? And they’d say, ‘No, no, no, there’s no medicine here.’ What?!”

  What Sachs saw in Africa defied logic and offended his sense of human decency. Since the industrial revolution, the West’s per capita income had increased twentyfold, whereas in Africa, over the same period, per capita income had increased not even fourfold. Why, at the most prosperous time in human history, was so much of our planet impoverished? Why were millions of human beings dying every year from diseases that we learned to prevent and treat a generation ago?

  Earlier in his career, when he was thinking about ways to improve people’s lives, Sachs had been convinced of the power of open markets, free trade, deregulation, privatization, and fiscal discipline. After his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa, however, he started looking at the world with new eyes. You might call it a spiritual conversion, a change of heart.

  “Economists say, ‘Reform the value-added tax. Get the budget deficit down. Open the borders,’ ” Sachs told a reporter in 2000, distancing himself from other economists. “That’s great stuff if you happen to be Poland. But it’s not the answer if you happen to be Tanzania, where you’re suffering holoendemic malaria, schistosomiasis, and everything else you can imagine.”

  Chapter 2

  Ahmed Maalim Mohamed

  According to his Kenyan passport, Ahmed Maalim Mohamed was born in 1965. In fact, Ahmed doesn’t know when or where he was born. Like many Somalis in the Horn of Africa, his father was a nomadic pastoralist who, along with his three wives, twenty-one children, and large herds of cattle and camels, kept moving from place to place in the vast semidesert region where Somalia, southern Ethiopia, and Kenya’s North Eastern Province meet.

  Ahmed is certain of this: he was born sometime during the Shifta War of 1963–68, a war between ethnic Somalis and the Kenyan government for control of North Eastern Province, then known as the Northern Frontier District. Ethnically speaking, North Eastern Province was, and still is, Somali; nonetheless, when the colonial powers carved up Africa, they ignored ethnic and tribal boundaries, with the result that borders sometimes bisected kingdoms, clans, lakes, and even villages. Nor did the mapmakers take into account patterns of nomadic migration. In short, colonial frontiers were no more than lines on a map—lines drawn by Europeans who, in many cases, had never been to the interior of Africa.

  The 682-kilometer border between Somalia and Kenya was drawn up during secret backroom negotiations in London, as part of a treaty between Britain and Italy during the First World War. Like so many other colonial borders in Africa, it was arbitrary, disconnected from the lives of people actually living there—yet, even after the collapse of European colonialism, the border remained in place. Thus when Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963, North Eastern Province—a parcel of land that should have been part of Somalia—was instead controlled by Kenya. The result was the Shifta War. Armed with AK-47s, hand grenades, and machetes, Somalis in North Eastern Province conducted hit-and-run raids on Kenyan police posts and took cover from aircraft fire by hiding in camel caravans. Enraged, the Kenyans declared martial law throughout the entire district, and Somali insurgents (and suspected insurgents) were detained without trial.

  Kenyans regarded the Shifta War as guerrilla warfare. (Shifta means “bandit” in Somali.) “Hooligans” was how Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president after independence, described the Somali secessionists. In a 1964 speech to Kenya’s parliament, Kenyatta made his position clear—the entire population of North Eastern Province was guilty of treason: “To the people who live in the Northeastern region, I have this much to say: We know that many of you are herdsmen during the day and shifta at night; others conceal shifta and refuse to give information about their movement.”

  By local standards, Ahmed’s father, Maalim Mohamed Maalim, was prosperous. Having three wives testified to that. Still, for the most part, a Somali’s worth is measured by his camels, not by his wives: the more camels he has, the greater his wealth and status in the community. The great Somali oral poets reserve their praises for she-camels, not for women. “O you who make such a sound of beauty with your bellow / O you who so blithely give voice to your bubbling growl / It is you I call!” was how the nineteenth-century pastoral poet Raage Ugaas addressed his she-camel. “O soft-footed soundless stalker / It is you I call!”

  Camels are expensive, but that’s not the whole story. Somalis revere camels because they represent heroic values: self-reliance, fearlessness, intelligence, and the ability to thrive in a harsh and unforgiving environment. For months at a time (as many as six, it’s said), a Somali nomad can subsist on nothing but camel milk. The Prophet Muhammad is believed to have extolled the medicinal properties of camel urine; according to many Somalis, drinking a she-camel’s urine can prevent or cure cancer, liver disease, digestive disorders, and HIV/AIDS, among other maladies.

  Maalim—whose full name, like that of all Somalis, comprises three first names: his own (Maalim), his father’s (Mohamed), and his grandfather’s (Maalim)—earned money by breeding long-horned Ankole cattle and selling the heifers. He then purchased camels. By the time his eldest son, Ahmed, was born, Maalim had a herd of approximately one hundr
ed camels. In Western terms, his camels were a store of wealth, like a mutual fund or a savings account. Just as some Western children receive silver spoons or cups at birth, so Maalim gave his firstborn son a she-camel. As soon as Ahmed’s umbilical cord was cut, it was tied to the tail of his she-camel—a Somali talisman meant to ensure the she-camel’s fertility. Her offspring and her offspring’s offspring, and so on, would provide Ahmed with enough capital to underwrite his future.

  Ahmed can’t recall being hungry as a young child. Like that of most Somali nomads, his family’s diet consisted mainly of camel’s milk supplemented with nyiri nyiri (dried camel meat preserved in fat). For the most part, Somalis do not farm the land—farming is menial work, and farmers rank far below nomadic herders on the social scale. From time to time Ahmed’s father traded a heifer at the market for sacks of sorghum or other grains. On special occasions—to celebrate the end of Ramadan, for example—he’d return home with bags of sweets, Somali halvah, or a sugared bread known as kac kac. Ahmed’s happiest childhood memories are of his father returning from market with grains and sweets.

  Maalim’s three wives took pride in maintaining the family’s homestead, erecting tall fences of brambles to protect it from lions and other beasts. They were responsible for constructing the family’s compound of Somali aqals, small dome-shaped huts. Using soft, sturdy twigs bound with braided-leather rope, they’d first erect a domed scaffolding in the sand. Next, slung over the scaffolding, came the roof and walls, made of heavy grass matting and cowhides to keep out sand and dust and rain.

  Every morning at dawn, Ahmed and his siblings headed out with their donkeys to gather firewood and fetch water from nearby streams or wells. Afternoons, the children herded the camels and cattle, roaming barefoot through the bush in search of grazing land. When the seasons changed and the soil began to crack and the wadis ran dry, Ahmed’s father and his wives would dismantle their aqals, pack up their few belongings, and with their livestock and children, begin the long walk upland to greener pastures.