Jeffrey D. Sachs

Popular among economists, pundits and policymakers, the theory of economic populism is used to criticize expansionist policies purportedly enacted by fiscally irresponsible populist governments. Introduced by Jeffrey Sachs, Rüdiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards in 1989, the theory maintains that such policies put into motion a cycle of economic devastation where populists register initial successes but soon face bottlenecks and other market failures that lead to hyperinflation and balance-of-payments problems, ending with regime change and the restoration of orthodox policies. On their part, political scientists have strongly resisted economically deterministic interpretations of populism, submitting adequate evidence that populist phenomena are not associated with particular economic policies. However, the popularity of economic populism remains intact. This article opens a new and expanded line of criticism by exposing the normative historical foundations of the theory of economic populism, while highlighting an array of conceptual, methodological and empirical flaws that render it unfit for scientific purposes. The insistence on its use despite obvious analytical shortcomings is explained as an artifact of economic populism’s ideologically weaponized nature.

Here is a paper on the resource curse and the tragedy of the commons based on two articles. The first one, presented by James Brander and Scott Taylor and called « The Simple Economics of Easter Island » describes the dynamics of the rise and fall of the Polynesian civilization that used to live on the island. In order to do so, they use the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, stressing a cyclical system of adjustment between population and natural resource following a « feast and famine » pattern out. This equilibrium, applied to the consumption of natural resources, permits to explain why Easter Island declined while other Polynesian peoples are still prosperous nowadays.
The second,  « The Curse of Natural Resources » and written by Warner and Sachs is centred on the notion of resource curse defined by George Soros as « the failure of resource-rich countries to benefit from their natural wealth ». They will anwer two questions: "Does the curse exist?" and "Why does the curse exist?".

In 2000, the Millennium Declaration provided a vision for a united struggle to create a global future wherein nations and peoples join the fight against plagues of our time, including: poverty, disease, injustice, war and terror, and degradation and destruction of our common home.  The Declaration distinguishes itself from many others because it establishes a roadmap and a timeframe for achieving eight goals through common actions based upon the principles and practices of democracy and human rights, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. All 189 members of the UN signed onto the Declaration, committing themselves to achieve eight “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs) by 2015 to improve the lives of three billion people at or near the poverty line.

The UN Millennium Project (known hereafter as the “MP”) is housed at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and headed up by economist Jeffrey Sachs. This essay critiques the final report of the Millennium Project (MP), Investing in Development, the MP’s Task Force reports, and publications by Jeffrey Sachs, particularly The End of Poverty.  It focuses on the shortcomings in the MP’s “development paradigm” as they relate to:
1) assessing the root causes of poverty and inequality;
2) fundamental conflicts of interest between donors and creditors, on the one hand, and recipient governments; on the other; and
3) the relationship between enforceable corporate rights and trade law as related to unenforceable international human rights law. 
This approach is taken in the hope that, by highlighting these shortcomings, the essay will contribute to the creation of an improved “roadmap” to eliminating poverty.  This critique deliberately focuses on the failings of Northern governments and Northern-led institutions to contribute in a more positive manner to poverty reduction, since the failings of developing country governments are already well-known and often  over-blown.

This paper examines the theory of sustainable development presented by Jeffrey Sachs in The Age of Sustainable Development. While Sustainable Development ostensibly seeks to harmonise the conflict between ecological sustainability and human development the paper argues this is impossible because of the conceptual frame it employs. Rather than allowing for a re-conceptualisation of the human-nature relation Sustainable Development is simply the latest and possibly last attempt to advance the core idea of western modernity-the notion of self-determination. Drawing upon Hegel's account of historical development it is argued that Sustainable Development and the notion of planetary boundaries cannot break out of a dualism of nature and self-determining agents.

Andrews’ victims are Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, Sonia Sotomayor. Their victims are the millennials (1980+), who, Andrews argues, are using the laid-back liberalism of their parents/ grandparents against them, in a perverse version of ‘the revolution eating its children'. I.e., the revolution eating its parents. The cult leaders of the 1960s+ ate the old left communist revolutionaries, leaving only ‘drugs, sex and rock&roll’, which has deformed into ‘cultural Marxism’ today.

Are societies products of the natural environment or of manmade institutions? Why are some countries more economically developed than others? These types of questions have been asked for centuries. With such questions in mind, Montesquieu gives us extensive musings and considerations about the various relationships among climate, laws, culture, and economics. Contemporary scholars, who are still struggling to answer these same types of questions, often look to Montesquieu as an authority on the climate aspect. However, as they tend to focus solely on Montesquieu’s thoughts on climate, they miss the greater theory that encompasses a number of other factors as well as the rather complex, interactive set of relationships among them. This shortsightedness and oversimplification of Montesquieu’s theory has limited the scope of what contemporary scholars seek to explore. By missing his greater theory, they have missed an opportunity to apply their advanced statistical methods to a comprehensive and dynamic theory that merits empirical investigation. In this project, I will try, in a minor way, to help bridge that gap. I will first attempt to pinpoint what were Montesquieu’s true intents regarding climate, laws, and economic development, and I will then use statistical methods to test his theory empirically.

This project uses statistical methods to test Montesquieu’s theories on climate, laws, and economic development. It thus offers a unique interpretive strategy. The empirical models in this study employ two interactions terms between geographic and institutional variables. By doing so, this project helps fill an important gap in the literature on geography and institutions, and it therefore contributes to the ongoing debate between which matters most for economic development. I find that the interaction between geography and institutions has a significant effect on economic development.