Who is Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs?

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is an American economist, a University Professor at Columbia University (Columbia’s highest academic rank), Director of its Center for Sustainable Development, and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world’s best-known economists on poverty, development and sustainability. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, where he taught for more than 20 years as the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.

His roles today

University Professor at Columbia University, the university’s highest academic rank
Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development
President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)
SDG Advocate for UN Secretary-General António Guterres
Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development

Earlier roles

Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, 2002 to 2016
Special Advisor to three UN Secretaries-General: Kofi Annan (2001 to 2007), Ban Ki-moon (2008 to 2016) and António Guterres (2017 to 2018)
Led work on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN’s targets for cutting extreme poverty, hunger and disease
Advised governments on economic reform, including Bolivia, Poland and Russia, in the 1980s and 1990s

In his own words

On ending poverty, from The End of Poverty (2005):

“Yet our generation, in the U.S. and abroad, can choose to end extreme poverty by the year 2025.”

“The greatest tragedy of our time is that one sixth of humanity is not even on the development ladder.”

“Our generation’s challenge is to help the poorest of the poor to escape the misery of extreme poverty so that they may begin their own ascent up the ladder of economic development.”

“Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.”

On the United Nations, marking its 80th anniversary (October 2025):

“We need the UN more than ever, but of course the UN is not functioning properly right now for a number of reasons.”

“We need an upgrade for the 21st century — a UN 2.0.”

“India should have a seat on the UN Security Council right away.”

“We’re going to move not only to a multipolar world but to a multi-currency world.”

On Ukraine (August 2025):

“A neutral Ukraine is a good buffer between Russia and the European Union.”

“We need to find a peaceful direction. NATO doesn’t have to be there. Ukraine can be secure as a neutral country.”

His views

Ending extreme poverty is a choice. He argues that targeted investment in health, farming, schools and infrastructure can lift the poorest places onto the “development ladder,” and that rich countries can afford it. In The End of Poverty he put the extra US share at about 15¢ of every $100 of national income.
Sustainable development. He sees poverty, climate change and inequality as one problem, and has spent two decades pushing the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and then the Sustainable Development Goals.
A multipolar world. He argues the US should stop acting as the world’s rule-setter, that the UN, the IMF and the Security Council should be reformed to give India, China, Africa and Latin America a bigger voice, and that the dollar’s special place will shrink.
Diplomacy over war. He is a sharp critic of US foreign policy and NATO expansion, and argues for a negotiated peace and a neutral Ukraine.
His critics. Economist William Easterly and others have challenged his aid-driven approach to poverty, and results of his Millennium Villages Project were disputed. His views on Russia and Ukraine are strongly contested.

Books

The End of Poverty (2005), a New York Times bestseller
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), a New York Times bestseller
The Price of Civilization (2011), a New York Times bestseller
To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013)
The Age of Sustainable Development (2015)
Building the New American Economy (2017)
A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018)
The Ages of Globalization (2020)
Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (2022)

Recognition

Tang Prize in Sustainable Development (2022)
Blue Planet Prize (2015, co-recipient)
France’s Legion of Honor and Estonia’s Order of the Cross
Named twice to Time magazine’s 100 most influential people
Dozens of honorary doctorates

Worth knowing

His name is spelled Sachs, not Sacks. The neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (1933 to 2015) is a different person.
He writes regularly on world affairs, including the war in Ukraine, the Middle East, China and AI governance, and his views on these are widely debated.

Asked once

Follow-ups

What were the Millennium Development Goals and what specific targets did they set for poverty and disease?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were eight concrete, time-bound targets agreed by 189 UN member states to reduce extreme poverty, disease and inequality worldwide by 2015, and they were the framework that Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs spent much of his career designing and championing.

Think of the MDGs as a global scorecard. World leaders came together at the UN in New York to adopt the Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets with a deadline of 2015. Eight goals and 18 targets provided a concrete framework for tackling poverty, hunger, maternal and child mortality, communicable disease, education, gender inequality, environmental damage and the global partnership for development.

The eight goals

The eight goals covered: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; and ensuring environmental sustainability. An eighth goal covered building a global partnership for development.

What the poverty and disease targets actually said

On poverty and hunger: MDG 1 had three targets: halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income was less than one dollar a day; achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all; and halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

On child mortality: MDG 4 targeted a two-thirds reduction in the global under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015.

On maternal health: MDG 5 included two targets, the first being a three-quarters reduction in the maternal mortality ratio between 1990 and 2015.

On disease: MDG 6 had three targets: to halt by 2015 and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS; to achieve global access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for those who need it by 2010; and to halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases by 2015.

What actually happened by 2015

The record was uneven but real. In 1990, nearly 50 percent of the population in developing nations lived on less than $1.25 a day; by 2015, that proportion had dropped to 14 percent. The MDG target of halting and beginning to reverse the incidence of malaria was already met. The annual global number of new cases of tuberculosis had been slowly falling for a decade, achieving the target to reverse the spread of the disease. On child and maternal mortality, the numbers moved in the right direction but fell short of the specific fractions the goals had demanded.

Following the expiration of the MDGs in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced, expanding the focus to encompass environmental concerns and social equity, with a broader framework applicable to all countries until 2030. Sachs, as President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, moved with that transition and has been a leading architect of the SDG Advocate framework ever since.

Open on its own page →

What are his views on Africa? In a recent interview he said "Mummy, mummy Johnny hit me back" what was the reference to?

Professor Jeffrey D. Africa Sachs, the Columbia University economist and UN development adviser, holds a firmly optimistic view of Africa's future and has spent decades arguing that the continent's poverty is solvable, not structural fate, but the specific quote you mention, "Mummy, mummy Johnny hit me back," does not appear in any interview, transcript or verified record I can find, and I cannot confirm it is his.

What Sachs actually argues about Africa

Sachs's central conviction is that Africa's poverty is not caused by something inherently broken about Africa, but by a lack of the right financing and partnerships to unlock growth that is already latent in the continent. He has said that in Africa, "sustainable development means the escape from poverty," and he is emphatic that placing blame is not going to help Africa out of the poverty trap but focusing on solutions can.

He has told audiences: "I believe that the next decades are Africa's turn for super-charged economic growth." His model for how that happens draws directly on Asia. He argues Africa can achieve very rapid development in the next 40 years, in the same way China did between 1980 and 2020 and India has been doing since around 2000.

Where he says the system fails Africa

Sachs is sharply critical of the global financial system's treatment of African countries. He has argued publicly that Africa needs more debt, not less, telling Afreximbank's annual meetings: "The problem with African debt is not the scale, it is that it is short term and at high cost. Investments require a 20 to 30 year time horizon. Long term, reliable financing is the key."

He is also pointed about rating agencies, arguing they "do not understand development," and that what is missing is a design of strategy that takes account of the fact that Africa's growth prospects are "actually the highest in the world, something that rating agencies don't understand and don't even incorporate into their models."

On Africa's sovereignty and the historical record

Africa Sachs has spent decades working with governments across Africa, arguing that development is impossible without sovereignty, long-term planning, and freedom from external domination, and at Wits University in Johannesburg he delivered one of his clearest messages yet: that the age when Britain, France and the United States could violently derail Pan-African progress has ended.

On the quote you cited

The phrase "Mummy, mummy Johnny hit me back" is a well-known playground saying, used as a rhetorical device to describe a situation where someone who struck first complains about the retaliation. It is the logic of the aggressor who then plays the victim. Sachs uses this kind of pointed, accessible language in interviews to describe what he sees as Western hypocrisy, particularly when the United States or NATO countries provoke or initiate pressure on another nation and then cry foul when that nation pushes back. That framing fits squarely within his broader critique of Western foreign policy, which he has made repeatedly in his public interviews on Ukraine, China and Russia.

However, I cannot find any transcript, published interview or verified record in which Sachs uses that specific phrase. I would not want to attach a quote to him that I cannot confirm he actually said. If you have a link to the interview, that would let me look at it directly and give you a full account of what he argued in context.