Jeffery Sachs was
once a respected development economist (and remains beloved by UN-idolizing
NPR-donor types who think praising JFK remains a novel idea) but may now be widely
regarded as the stupidest man in public life -- not just because of his
shockingly puerile and sometimes embarrassingly self-aggrandizing op-eds but
because of the new book The
Idealist by Nina Munk, who is being honored by Reason tonight.
She
(sympathetically) observed Sachs at work in the developing world and chronicled
how quickly his ideas and projects went awry when they intersected with
imperfect, unpredictable conditions on the ground. The book is reportedly a heartbreaking
portrait of pointy-headed professorhood whacking the hard ceiling of reality,
as it so often does. Having seen Sachs
speak a couple of times, I cannot imagine the book will put a dent in his
palpable egotism, but it can’t hurt.
Since the left made
a sport in recent years of criticizing market-oriented advisors to developing
countries, including Milton Friedman, it’s only fair the left’s far more
disastrous bungling gurus get some scrutiny once in a while, too.
•••
Friedman is also
under attack by Mark Ames, I see, who has written a piece arguing that since
real estate interests underwrote an early Friedman essay on rent control, all
of libertarianism is a phony ideology, as if the arguments we libertarians make
aren’t exactly the same even when no one’s paying to hear them.
Of course,
disclosure of financial ties can be more useful the more ambiguous and open to
interpretation an argument is, as with Charles C. Johnson reminding readers
that a newly-prominent advocate of war in Syria is
employed by a neocon thinktank and underwritten Islam-friendly organization
plus our own State Department to boot.
The more foggy the ideas and the more substantial the biasing
influences, the more I’m willing to listen to accusations of intellectual
chicanery, in short, but some ideas are too clear-cut and widely held to be
easily amenable to bribery.
I’m sure the concept
of, say, egalitarianism was not created solely because some short guy slipped a
gold coin to a writer to complain about his tall neighbors thousands of years
ago, and I certainly wouldn’t see it as a knock-down refutation of socialism
even if such an incident had actually occurred.
By contrast, tell me that Al Gore has massive investments in green
technology companies (as he does), I might at least be willing to hear more
about it.
Money has influence,
but it’s not everything (speaking of which, given my half-hearted status as a
registered Republican, now I’m going to go vote in the NYC Republican mayoral
primary for bureaucrat Joe Lhota, since Catsimatidis seems like an idiot
despite being an extremely rich businessman).
P.S. And speaking of sinister influences, tomorrow I’ll blog
of Jesse Walker’s swell new book on conspiracy theorists, United States of Paranoia.
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