Michael Clemens is quoted in a Foreign Policy article about Jeffrey Sachs.
From the article:
Eight years ago, when Jeffrey Sachs launched an ambitious project to fight global poverty, he surely didn't suspect that it might end up calling into question his work as one of America's leading economists. In the 1980s and '90s, Sachs had made headlines with his work advising reformist governments in Latin America and Eastern Europe -- a record that firmly established him as a first-rank public intellectual and ensured him easy access to the offices of presidents and prime ministers from Warsaw to Moscow. There's a reason the New York Times once described him as "probably the most important economist in the world."
No one is a more relentless critic of Sachs and MVP than Michael Clemens, a staff economist at Birdsall's think tank and Sachs's former student who was prominently cited by Nature for his role in sharply questioning the flawed study on child mortality published in the Lancet. Clemens first met Sachs at Harvard in 2001. At the time, Sachs was director of the university's Center for International Development (he left Harvard for Columbia in 2002), and Clemens was a research fellow at the center while pursuing a Ph.D. in the economics department. "I idolized him," Clemens wrote of Sachs in an email to FP. "I wanted to be exactly the kind of economist I saw in him: brave, rigorous, relevant."
Read it here.
