Friday, March 2, 2012

Reuters: Don’t send Jeff Sachs to the World Bank

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS POSTING ON REUTERS

In 2002, Jeff Sachs took the top job at one of the most ambitious university departments in the world: the Earth Institute at Columbia University. And he’s done that job very well, judging by the main metric that universities care about. When he re-upped his contract last April, the press release gushed about all the multi-million-dollar donations that the Earth Institute has received, including $20 million from the Gates Foundation and $28 million from the Lenfest Foundation to endow climate change research.

Now, however, Sachs wants to leave: he’s got his eye on a job where the sums of money involved make those numbers seem positively puny.

My quest to help end poverty has taken me to more than 125 countries, from mega-city capitals to mountaintop villages, from rain forest settlements to nomadic desert camps. Now I hope it will take me to 18th and Pennsylvania, to the presidency of the World Bank. I am eager for this challenge.

To a certain extent, Sachs’s job application reads almost like self-parody: “the president of the World Bank spends a lot of time travelling in first class to poor countries. I have been doing that for years, so I’m obviously highly qualified for the job.”

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS POSTING ON REUTERS

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