Jeffrey Sachs is used to thinking big: His area of expertise is nothing less than our entire planet. As director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, he worries about climatic changes that could have dire consequences for us all. As director of the United Nations' Millennium Project, he works to save billions of people from disease, hunger, and the other ravages of extreme poverty. And as a leading economist and a special adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations, he has a unique appreciation of the monetary and political obstacles to tackling these global challenges. In February, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis, he captivated the crowd with early results from a project in Africa that uses low-cost fertilizers and improved farming techniques to increase crop yields several times over. Sachs travels constantly, not just from country to country but from continent to continent. Discover managed to catch him between flights at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
On the spectrum from microeconomics to macroeconomics, you've gone as macro as possible. What led you in this direction?
I've been interested in one question for—my God!—about 35 years: What makes a society work well? I was lucky to be taken by my parents to the Soviet Union when I was in high school. Communism was a puzzlement. Why would there be a different kind of political system on the same planet? Which one works? Which doesn't? That was a major prod toward looking at what leads to well-being.
After the fall of Communism, you advised governments in Eastern Europe and Russia on their transition to market economies. Did things turn out the way you expected?
I don't think anybody anticipated what the health implications would be. In some parts of central and Eastern Europe, not only did life expectancy rise but heart disease went down a lot: Changes away from high cholesterol and fatty diets helped that. In Russia, on the other hand, life expectancy plummeted, and deaths of middle-aged and older men rose significantly. There is still a big debate about why. Was it alcoholism and stress from the collapse of an empire? Or were more subtle factors involved? Some nutritionists believe that there were small changes in the men's diet that were very adverse, like a low level of some micronutrients, but this is still not proved.
