Jeffery Sachs

In the halls of politics and power, most economists are like wallpaper– full of intricate details but ultimately decoration. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is a brand name. A player. There’s Jeff with the Pope. There’s Jeff with U.N. chief Kofi Annan. There’s Jeff with his save-the-world sidekick, U2’s Bono.

Sachs, 50, has been around the planet more times than a space station to promote the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, to raise annual aid to 0.7 percent of GNP of the donor countries (starting with an extra $70 billion per year as of 2006), in order to halve poverty by 2015. He’s a special adviser to Annan while pursuing a day job as head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which reflects his philosophy as an economist: that sustainable development can be achieved only through an approach that considers everything from geography to infrastructure to family structure. “Right now, I’m just running flat between all these various assignments,” he said last week. “I got back from Ethiopia yesterday. Did a dinner talk. Flew to Washington. I’m hosting a seminar this evening. I’m at the U.N. the next two days and then off to Japan.”

Sachs accidentally inserted himself into history. A star at Harvard–he was a tenured professor at 28–he found himself in 1985 at a seminar about Bolivia, which at the time was being battered by hyperinflation. I can fix that, he blurted. The Bolivians accepted the offer. Sachs neglected to tell them that he had never actually worked on a real live economy. But he soon left for Bolivia and made good on his word, stabilizing the currency. His work for the developing world had begun. He would later develop a radical economic program for the Solidarity-led Polish government that helped the country create a market economy. But he hit a wall as an adviser to Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, where kleptocrats helped undermine his program. Disappointed, he resigned after two years.

Sachs found that the standard policy toolbox used by the International Monetary Fund–structural adjustment–was limited and often harmful to poor countries. AIDs and malaria in Africa can be a greater obstacle to growth than debt. “Life doesn’t come with one problem neatly separated from the rest. Specialization is helpful, but you’ve got to see the web,” he says. Sachs labels this comprehensive approach “clinical economics.” It’s an idea he gleaned from his wife Sonia Ehrlich, a pediatrician.

Can he save the poor? The photo ops with Bill Clinton are easy; nobody is for poverty. Aid to developing countries is inching upward, but Sachs knows the large checks haven’t come in yet. “The big money is what the year 2005 is about,” he says. –By Bill Saporito