By Ankush
Joe Nocera’s weekly, reported columns for the Times Business section are usually quite good. But every once in while, things go weirdly awry, and the normally sensible Nocera reveals an odd penchant for contrarianism.
A few months ago, it was his column on Jeffrey Sachs, whose impressive efforts to eradicate malaria and reduce global poverty Nocera
referred to as “laudable” but unable to achieve their goals “in any
serious way.” To demonstrate this, he quoted and channeled Tyler Cowen at great length, without offering Sachs or one of his supporters any space to respond to Cowen’s
specific criticisms, which mainly boiled down to claims about the
difficulties Sachs would have scaling up his small and successful
projects to a grander scale. Nocera concluded by noting that Sachs was engaged in “a worthy effort but probably not as profoundly transformative as he likes to portray it.” The reader could have been forgiven for wondering why Nocera blew prime real estate and his own time in order to mildly deflate efforts he seemed to actually find worthwhile.
