It seems I am not alone in my opinions of this narcissist.

Certain of Sachs’ critics within the dev biz dismiss him as “one of the world’s most gifted self-publicists” flogging “superficially attractive but deeply flawed ideas,” as former World Bank official David Ellerman puts it. He says that Sachs’ prescriptions rely on top-down, neocolonial, interventionist solutions that have failed in the past.

Meanwhile, Naomi Klein, an anti[at]globalization writer and activist, calls Sachs “Doctor Shock.” She accuses him of having a dark past in which he prescribed not “moral medicine” but “shock therapy” economics for populations that were already too stunned to resist.

Other critics blame him and his whiz-kid colleagues—the so-called Harvard boys, including Obama’s economics guru Lawrence Summers—for missing a historic opportunity more than a decade ago in post-Soviet Russia. The disastrous attempt to turn a titanic collectivist economy into a capitalist democracy virtually overnight—an attempt that “privatized” the Russian economy into poverty, oligarchy, and gangsterism in the ’90s—gave capitalist democracy a bad name and paved the way for Putinism and renewed political and even military hostility, as evidenced by the invasion of Georgia. Will Sachs be remembered for saving the world in Africa or setting it on the path to destruction in Russia?