Jeffrey David Sachs

Education

• Charming and popular, Sachs was Oak Park High School student council president. However, unlike most teens, he was passionate and active about politics. Sachs marched on Moratorium Day, a day university students around the nation spent protesting the Vietnam War and calling for its end. Sachs also attended rallies that featured the legendary United Farm Worker leader Cesar Chavez.
  
  
• Harward
  He graduated from Oak Park High School. He attended Harvard College, where he received his B.A. summa cum laude in 1976. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and was invited to join the Harvard Society of Fellows while still a Harvard graduate student.

Career

• In 1980, he joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982. A year later, at the age of 28, Sachs became a Full Professor of economics with tenure at Harvard.
  
  During the next 19 years at Harvard, he became the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade, the Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development at the Kennedy School of Government (1995–1999), and the Director of the Center for International Development (1999–2002).
  
  In 2002, Sachs left Harvard to become the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia he is the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and is also a professor in Columbia's Department of Economics and the Department of Health Policy and Management. His classes are taught at the School of International and Public Affairs and theMailman School of Public Health, and his course "Challenges of Sustainable Development" is taught at the undergraduate level.
  
  In his capacity as Director of the Earth Institute, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development. Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of University education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S. He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree. The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College. The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.
  
  Sachs’ policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.
  
  In 2011 Sachs called for the creation of a third U.S. political party, an "Alliance for the Radical Center".
  
  

Religion

Works

• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Penguin, 2005) book
• Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin, 2008) book
• The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (Random House, 2011) book

Connections

• Mother: Joan (née Abrams)
• Father: Theodore Sachs - labor lawyer
• Wife: Sonia Ehrlich Sachs - Pediatrician
• Daughter: Lisa Sachs
• Daughter: Hannah Sachs
• Son: Adam Sachs
• influenced by: John Maynard Keynes
  

  economist