How Jeffrey Sachs Sells Woke

The renowned economist makes woke politics seem respectable

One might be forgiven for assuming that the animating force behind woke ideology lies in the fevered grievances of cluster B activists and the terminally online, but its real fuel is the Marxist slop of academia, tarted up in the performative vocabulary of queer and decolonial dogma. Forget the rabble radicals, the architects of woke are the oppression studies gurus and intersectionalist high priests who rebrand racism as anti-racism, rioting as reckoning, and terrorism as resistance.

Which brings me to Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs. No, he doesn’t rant about pronouns or cry about microaggressions. He doesn’t call for decolonizing math or demand trigger warnings for Shakespeare. But that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous. Sachs is a narrative engineer whose influence runs deep, whose arguments are refined, and whose audience has no idea they’re being played.

Whether blaming America for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, praising China’s imperialist ambitions, or casting authoritarian regimes as victims of structural oppression, Sachs delivers seemingly sober analysis that repackages leftist politics and anti-American rhetoric as reasoned conjecture. And you better not dismiss him as some regulation gremlin or think-tank hamster either, because behind the scenes, Sachs is shaping elite discourse, reforming national economies, and whispering his revisionist worldview into the ears of policymakers.

Sachs is laying the intellectual groundwork for a geopolitical realignment that would see the United States sidelined in favor of regimes like China and Russia, and where liberal values take a backseat to so-called pragmatic diplomacy with despots.

If you’ve ever debated a Sachs bro, you know what I mean. Bring up the war in Ukraine and they’ll sneer at you if you decry genocidal violence or the mass kidnappings of children, all while predictably deflecting to talking points around NATO expansion and Russia’s sphere of influence — as if Ukraine has no agency in its own security choices or as if great power politics cancel out human decency.

Surprisingly, however, Sachs lands with a diverse crowd, particularly those interested in his moderately Keynesian but heavily structuralist approach to economics, which is where we get the first whiff of wokery, because the big idea behind structuralist economic theory is that economic inequality is not the result of policy decision or market forces, but structural barriers. This idea is closely tied to dependency theory, which argues that poor nations are poor because wealthier nations exploit them.

There is truth to both schools of thought, but once you start laying all a country’s economic woes at the feet of the West — such as by blaming U.S. foreign policy when Russia wages a war of aggression in Eastern Europe and the Moscow Exchange plummets 33% in one of the biggest single-day crashes in Russian history — you can see how this begins to rhyme with idea of structural racism and the conceit that everything bad that ever happened to people having color is the fault of white folks.

A brutal blueprint for temporary salvation

To be fair, when Sachs swooped into Peru and Russia in the 1990s, both countries were in economic free fall. Peru had an inflation rate of 7,500% in 1990, the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was carrying out bombings in the capital city of Lima, and the leftist populist President Alan García was busily running the economy into the ground with price freezes, heavy borrowing, and nationalization.

After Alberto Fujimori took over in 1990, Sachs helped design “shock therapy” reforms to combat hyperinflation. And it worked. Cutting subsidies, privatization, and deregulation stabilized the economy. But it also caused severe short-term hardship. After “Fujishock,” Peru’s hyperinflation collapsed from 7,500% in 1990 to 410% in a single year — reaching 11% by 1995. But unemployment jumped to the highest levels in half a century as privatization led to mass layoffs, and the removal of food and fuel subsidies caused consumer prices to rise over 3,000% annually in early 1990 — before doubling. Even worse, Fujimori used the crisis to justify dissolving Congress, suspending the constitution, and sanctioning death squads.

By the late 1990s, Peru significantly modified the Sachs reforms to soften the blow of unemployment and poverty, but kept most of them in place, fueling a 252% increase in per capita GDP from 1999 to 2013. The country regained international credit access, attracted foreign investment, and today, the San Isidro neighborhood of Lima even rivals Georgetown or Brooklyn and, in my opinion, in some ways surpasses them.

So we can chalk Peru up as a win for Sachs, even if it was more sledgehammer than scalpel. But Russia is arguably his greatest failure, where again he advised shock therapy, and again, consumer prices skyrocketed. Ordinary Russians saw their life savings wiped out as the government printed money to cover deficits. As in Peru, Sachs all but eliminated inflation, which dropped 1,669% in a single year. But whereas Peru was a semi-market system where economic power was dispersed across many industries, Soviet state assets were centrally controlled. So when privatization hit, former Communist elites seized whole industries, forming the oligarch class that controls Russia today.

In both cases, Sachs delivered on his promise to eliminate hyperinflation. In both cases, the poor and middle classes suffered horribly. And in both cases, the ensuing chaos created a power vacuum that was rapidly filled by tyrants.

Another place where Sachsian shock therapy didn’t have the intended result is Bolivia. Here again, he ended hyperinflation, bringing it from 20,000% in 1985 to below 11% by 1987. But as in Peru and Russia, this led to a spike in unemployment, and when laid-off workers turned to coca farming, Bolivia soon become the third-largest coca producer after Colombia and Peru. By the late 1980s, illegal coca exports surpassed the country’s legal exports.

As part of its War on Drugs, the U.S. pressured the Bolivian government to burn coca crops, but this only enraged the farmers, known as cocaleros — and one of them rode the rising tide of leftist populism, rural outrage by the victims of Sachsian austerity measures, and coca politics. A former cocalero himself, Evo Morales came to power in 2006. He expelled the DEA two years later, even as Brazilian gangs and Mexican cartels tightened their grip on the country.

If you haven’t noticed the pattern yet, here it is. Sachs leads nations out of failing leftist economic policies by shoving them the other way — hard — often leading to a rebound whereby the countries he “helps” end up deeper in ruin, led by gangsters or dictators or backsliding into communism, which Sachs then blames on the West.

We’ll get to that last part in a minute, but as for the rest, it’s not that his approach is entirely wrong. It’s just too much, too soon. More gradual liberalization reforms, modeled on his approach, have proven more successful, as in the case of Peru — or in Chile during the years after Augusto Pinochet.

Let’s also remember that Sachs has done an enormous amount of good. He designed a stable currency for Estonia, helped Slovenia transition from Yugoslavia, consulted on debt restructuring in Argentina, reduced poverty in Ghana, improved agriculture in Ethiopia, helped Mongolia transition to a market economy, helped stabilize Indonesia after the Asian financial crisis, and greatest of all, helped India climb out of poverty.

As I have written before, India eliminating extreme poverty last year is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, and Sachs gets some credit for this.

From wildcat capitalism to woke catechism

In addition to the Sachs fans noted above, he also attracts followers from progressive and liberal circles who support his advocacy for social democracy. Others follow him for his insights on sustainable development, as he is the former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University​, which focuses on environmental research. This is all well and good, and some of it I even admire. What concerns me is when he leverages his well-deserved reputation in these areas to offer hot takes on political affairs.

In an essay titled “The Truth About Trump’s Mob,” Sachs argued that the most salient feature of the Capitol attack on January 6 was the fact that the mob was mostly white. The truth about Trump’s mob, he wrote, is that it was an example of “white hate”:

The United States has a long history of mob violence stoked by white politicians in the service of rich white Americans. What was unusual this time is that the white mob turned on the white politicians, rather than the people of color who are usually the victims … America’s culture of white mob violence goes hand in hand with its gun culture.

There have been white mobs in American history, but claiming that the country has a “culture of white mob violence” is very much like claiming that America has a “rape culture.” Sachs even goes so far as to repeat the great lie, which has by now become an IQ test of sorts, claiming Trump “praised white supremacists as ‘very fine people,’” when of course Trump never did any such thing. But as far as Sachs is concerned, a vote for Trump is a vote for white supremacy, as he says later in the piece:

In the grand sweep of history, America is indeed turning the corner on its past of racism and white mob violence. Barack Obama was elected to the presidency twice, and when Trump won in 2016, he received fewer votes than his opponent. Between Kamala Harris’s election as vice president and Georgia’s Senate elections this week, there is strong evidence to show that America is gradually shifting away from white oligarchic rule.

In other words, the more evidence we have that people support politicians like Obama and Harris, and the less support we see for Trump, the more we can rest assured that America is leaving behind “white oligarchic rule,” i.e. white supremacy. He adds:

The Trumpian virulence on display at the Capitol may have been dismaying. But it should be seen as a desperate, pathetic last gasp. Fortunately, the America of racist white rule is receding, if still far too slowly, into history.

Sachs believes Trump and his supporters represent “the America of racist white rule,” yet his views have found some resonance among Trump supporters, predictably where their views align, such as skepticism toward foreign interventions or establishment policies. Sachs has been vocal about his opposition to U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, which aligns with Trump’s America First approach.​ But Trump supporters oppose U.S. involvement abroad because they think we should be spending our money here at home, a sentiment that comes from a patriotic place, even if one disagrees.

The woke left, by contrast, is anti-patriotic in its casting of America as a white supremacist, settler, carceral state that is singularly responsible for the ills of the world. According to this worldview, we should not meddle abroad because, to put it in the simplest possible terms, we are the bad guys. And the America First crowd ought to understand that this second framing is closer to Sach’s perspective.

In the clip Ben Shapiro is referencing above, Sachs praises China’s Belt and Road initiative — on Chinese state TV, no less. Never mind that this is an expansionist, fascist state. Or that Belt and Road is debt-trap diplomacy. Sri Lanka literally lost ownership of one of its own ports over this project. And this has direct military implications too, such as China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti — right near major global shipping routes.

Not to mention reports of environmental devastation, such as an acidic waste spill from a Chinese copper mine in Zambia this year, threatening the water supply of millions of people. Or deforestation by 26 Chinese projects in Latin America. Where are your environmentalist principles when it comes to China, Jeffrey?

But in the clip above, he describes the Belt and Road as a “phenomenally positive initiative,” adding, “The only change I would make to the Belt and Road program, in addition to expanding it, would be to lengthen the maturity of the loans that are given.”

Apparently then, he has no thoughts t offer about potential changes regarding environmental impact, forced labor, or human trafficking.

Every global horror is somehow America’s fault

Oh, but it gets so much worse. Since 2011, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people in airstrikes, barrel bombs, chemical attacks, and mass executions, including tens of thousands of children. But here is Sachs, during a 2023 interview with New Yorker writer Isaac Chotiner, arguing that al-Assad was provoked into killing innocent people by the U.S., and also, that he never actually killed his own people:

---

I am telling people that the narrative that we have is leading to an escalation of deaths, and it’s putting us on a path to nuclear devastation.

I know, but you’re also talking about people being “provoked” into slaughtering civilians.

The United States armed the opposition to Assad with the instruction to overthrow Assad. That’s a war.

He was a dictator who was slaughtering his own people. Are you aware of that?

No.

No?

I’m aware of a lot more than you are aware of about Syria, because I know a great deal about the day-to-day events from the spring of 2011 onward, and I urge you to look at that, Isaac, seriously.

---

Sachs blames the U.S. for the situation in Syria, not Russia and not Assad. He denies any guilt on China’s behalf regarding Covid and describes the lab leak theory — which always was and remains the likeliest explanation — as “reckless and dangerous.” At least he didn’t add racist, but Sachs does has a lab leak theory of his own, which is that the U.S. is to blame for Covid. Because of course it is.

Sachs also blames the U.S. for Venezuela’s economy, rather than Russia or its socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. He blames the violence in Gaza on the U.S. supporting Israel, dismissing the idea that Hamas is actually more to blame and claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, and Vladimir Putin are cast as the bad guys by “U.S. propaganda,” as opposed to actually being pretty bad.

Additionally, he points to U.S. as having contributed to instability and humanitarian issues in Somalia, as opposed to the horrific dictatorships of Siad Barre (whose military leaders, by the way, included Ilhan Omar’s father). He blames U.S. policies in Sudan as having impeded peaceful resolutions without so much as mentioning its long-time psychopathic dictator Omar al-Bashir. His views regarding Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and other places echo such analysis. That is, whatever the fact on the ground, however vile the local leadership, the problems can be laid at the feet of the Great Satan, almost every single time.

If he lived in 1945, no doubt he would blame the U.S. for the Holocaust and talks about how Nazi Germany was put in a difficult situation but did the best it could given the circumstances.

A curious alignment with Kremlin narratives

Sachs also blames the U.S. for Ukraine, and in fact, he signed an open letter titled “Ceasefire Now!” in June 2022, which questioned the continued Western support of Ukraine. He repeated this ignorant point in an interview earlier this year, when he criticized Zelenskyy for not wanting a ceasefire, saying:

Zelensky ruled out any negotiations. He said it’s illegal. This was a declaration of the Ukrainian government. So, the government of Ukraine, sadly, really unwisely — I tried many, many times to explain to them — they ruled out negotiations. They ruled them out until today. This is tragic for them.

He added, referring to the Trump administration’s demand that Zelenskyy agree to a ceasefire:

The Trump administration, for the first time, is telling the truth about the fundamental causes of this war and how it can end. And that is the best news possible for Ukraine, first and foremost, and for the United States, for Russia and for the world, that peace could come to Ukraine very, very shortly. So, this, I think, is the bottom line.

At this point, Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was also part of the interview, responded:

The story that professor Sachs just told, there are elements of truth to it, but … that’s misleading and, frankly, completely one-sided, absolving Vladimir Putin of any responsibility. Vladimir Putin is the one who chose to invade Ukraine, let’s remember. It’s important to understand the history, important to understand that the role that NATO expansion has played as being seen as a threat to Russia, that is real. That, however, does not explain Vladimir Putin’s decision to illegally invade, annex and occupy parts of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin himself has told us multiple times what his vision for Ukraine is, and that’s to retake Ukraine and make it once again part of the larger Russian imperium. So, again, important to understand the historical context, but I would really warn against seeing, you know, Vladimir Putin as some kind of innocent victim of American machinations here, which is the story that professor Sachs seems to be trying to tell.

And lastly, it really denies the Ukrainians any agency, any responsibility for their own independence, for their own democracy. The Ukrainians are not simply being treated as instruments of American power here. The Ukrainians have made decisions on their own. Some of them have been wise, some of them very admirable, some of them less so. I think we can discuss that, as well … Vladimir Putin has told us repeatedly about his very expansive goals and what he really hopes to achieve in Ukraine, and it’s not just about NATO. I mean, this should not be news to anyone here.

Duss is, of course, correct. Russia is not a victim of “Western imperialism” and Ukraine is not a “White House puppet.” Putin is practically screaming his imperialist ambitions from the rooftops, and folks who want to frame his invasion as a reaction to NATO are no different than the meatheads who think Hamas are the victims.

Not to mention, the politically literate in Ukrainian or Russian affairs have long understood the futility of appeals to a ceasefire because Russia has a proven history of using ceasefires in other conflicts to regroup and intensify its assault. Putin isn’t interested in peace. If you know Russia, the you know that you do not cut deals with Putin unless you’ve got your knee on his throat.

This is why knuckle-dragging Sachs bros are wrong when they criticize Zelenskyy for not seeking a ceasefire “to put an end to the meat-grinder.” This is also why Vice President Vance was wrong, as I recently argued, when he accused Zelenskyy of being “disrespectful” after Zelenskyy pointed out that a ceasefire has already been tried, and it only gave Putin time to regroup and hit harder.

All this was recently proven true after Zelenskyy relented and agreed to a ceasefire, which Russia almost immediately rejected.

Putin’s foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov was perfectly frank about the decision. Why would we ease off and agree to a ceasefire when we can press our advantage, take more territory, and kill more Ukrainians? This doesn’t mean that Russia will never agree to a ceasefire, but it’s unlikely to do so unless it happens on Putin’s terms.

Vladimir Putin does not want peace. But if you listen to Sachs, you come away believing that this might be the only thing Putin really wants, in addition perhaps to peace and harmony for the human race. Nor does Sachs try to hide his bias here. On Andrew Napolitano’s podcast, Sachs recently joked about their mutual friend, the Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov, who Sachs describes as a “wonderful, wonderful, remarkable person.”

I’m going to take a detour here to discuss Lavrov, because the fact that Sachs is buddies with him speaks volumes. Critics accuse Lavrov of being a key figure in Russia’s disinformation campaigns. He regularly spreads false narratives, particularly regarding Ukraine, Syria, and Western policies. He has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine is run by “neo-Nazis” and that NATO is the aggressor in the region. When critics pointed out that Zelenskyy is Jewish, or that Ukraine has no significant Nazi influence in its government or military, or that far-right parties in Ukraine have little political power, Lavrov merely repeated the old lie that Hitler “had Jewish blood.”

Lavrov has also insisted that Russia did not actually invade Ukraine in 2022 but was instead conducting a “special military operation” to protect Russians, stating, “We did not invade Ukraine. We declared a special military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the West that dragging Ukraine into NATO was a criminal act.”

The reality, of course, is that the war in Ukraine is a full-scale invasion with Russian troops attacking Ukrainian cities, targeting civilian infrastructure, and annexing Ukrainian territories. During a 2022 press conference, Lavrov dismissed reports of Russian war crimes in Bucha and Mariupol as “Western propaganda,” despite overwhelming satellite imagery and eyewitness testimony confirming Russian attacks.

Lavrov is blamed for worsening Russia’s global isolation due to his unwavering defense of Putin’s policies. His tenure has seen Russia become increasingly cut off from the West, with sanctions, diplomatic expulsions, and Russia’s exclusion from forums like the G8 (now G7).

Sachs and the new global axis

Sachs opposes U.S. or the West expanding or even cementing its influence such as with NATO, but praises China doing the same with BRI. He slams U.S. “imperialist foreign policy” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria — but has fuck all to say about the literal fascist imperialism of Russia or China, even in some of those same countries. And some of his talking points eerily echo, or verbatim match, Kremlin talking points — which he often delivers right on Russian state TV.

Again, imagine taking any pundit seriously who appeared — even a single time — on Pyongyang TV spouting North Korean talking point almost word-for-word. You’d never listen to a damn thing the guy had to say ever again.

Why does he do it? Is he a paid agent? People say this about Trump too, and there’s a lot of overstretching the evidence taking place these days. It’s like speculating about whether Trump is racist in his heart-of-hearts or merely given to saying things that many people regard as such. To be honest, I have no idea nor do I think it really matters if Trump is racist or Sachs is an agent. We can make an adequate assessment on their actions alone without diluting the discursive force of that assessment with speculative and potentially conspiratorial frames.

But I do know this. Sachs was involved in advising post-Soviet Russia on market reforms in the 1990s. He may have even made sizable investments himself because, why not, right? So you could maybe then understand why he has since argued that U.S. economic policies led to Russia’s economic collapse by prioritizing rapid privatization over sustainable development. Or his gripe that the U.S. prioritized Wall Street over Russia. Like, motherfucker, are we supposed to put Russia first?

If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say he’s like Musk or Thiel or Yarvin or some of these other Silicon bros who want democratic institutions removed, or who want to usher in Russia and China’s rise, because although those places are horrific fascist states, they’re pretty awesome if you’ve got a lot of money and are tight with the leadership.

In fact, though Russia and China mean virtually zero freedom for 99% of the people who live there, if you’re a billionaire and Putin or Xi enjoy having your support, or a trusted economic advisor who happily parrot your propaganda, then Russia and China are actually places where you can be infinitely more “free” because you are unrestrained by the democratic institutional norms that, you know, exist to ensure freedom for all.

The one thing I would not do is reject Sachs entirely, as I have argued people should not do with Trump or The New York Times. We live in an age of excluded middles, and we have to constantly remind ourselves of that fact. Sachs makes a lot of good points and offers many penetrating insights that are worth absorbing. His nautical charts are accurate and his compass is precise, even if he consistently manages to arrive on the wrong shore.