[PEN-L:32461] Re: The Economics Biz

["Carl Remick" <carlremick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: michael perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Columbia Buys Residence
> To House Top Professor
>
> Jon E. Hilsenrath,
> Wall Street Journal
>
> NEW YORK -- Columbia University has taken star wars for college
> economics professors to a new level with the acquisition of an $8
> million townhouse in Manhattan that will house one of its top
> economists, Jeffrey Sachs.
>
> In April, the university lured Mr. Sachs away from Harvard University,
> where he earned a reputation as a confidant to leaders in developing
> countries. He is now head of Columbia's Earth Institute and an adviser
> to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, not to mention Bono, the
> rock star and activist.
>
> ... Mr. Sachs plans to use the institute to push a broad agenda focused
> on what economists call sustainable development. This means the
> university is keen to focus not just on the cold-hard formulas of
> economics, but also on issues like disease and the environment and how
> they affect poor economies....

[Wow. Making Sachs head of this Earth Institute is pretty much like naming
Typhoid Mary director of the World Health Organization.  E.g., consider what
Jude Wanniski had to say in 1998 about Sachs' wondrous role in Russia's
economic transformation:]

On Thursday, June 4, [1998] The New York Times published an op-ed, "Rule of
the Ruble," by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Harvard Institute for
International Development, a "non-profit group" that has been making a
fortune in salary and perks for the incompetent economists, who are living
off U.S. taxpayer grants from the Clinton administration. You can read about
this scandal in the June 1 issue of the Nation, which the NYT does not
mention. Sachs from December 1991 to January 1994 was an "economic advisor
to the Russian Government," according to the NYT. It was in fact Sachs who
authored the "shock therapy" plan that was sold to the Yeltsin government,
which sent the ruble into its inflationary spiral, from four to the dollar
to more than 6000 to the dollar -- wiping out the ruble savings and pensions
of the ordinary people of Russia. The "shock therapy" scheme was backed to
the hilt by The New York Times editorial page, which gets its economic
orders from the Harvard boys. These include Larry Summers, who is now the
deputy Treasury Secretary and was the chief economist of the World Bank when
Sachs was poisoning Russia with his economic nostrums. At the time, I called
Summers "Mr. Inside," and Sachs "Mr. Outside." ... Countless thousands of
Russians have died of malnutrition, alcoholism and disease as a result of
Jeffrey Sachs and his Ph.D. henchmen from the Ivy League ....

<http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/06-05-98.html>

Carl



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