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Jeffrey Sachs: Pope whisperer The economist has undergone a conversion

Was Jeffrey Sachs inspired by the Pope?Francis (Credit: Fillipo Monteforte/AFP via Getty)

Was Jeffrey Sachs inspired by the Pope?Francis (Credit: Fillipo Monteforte/AFP via Getty)


July 15, 2024   6 mins

Earlier this year, when Pope Francis suggested that Ukraine should have “the courage of the white flag” and negotiate with the Kremlin, the outrage that followed was swift and derisive. “Our flag is a yellow and blue one,” shot back Ukraine’s foreign minister. “Ukrainians cannot surrender because surrender means death,” thundered the nation’s Greek Catholic Church which, on theological matters, is aligned with the Vatican. A regional expert commented that the only party that needed courage was His Holiness — “to negotiate with Lucifer the surrender of the Catholic Church”.

Amid the indignation, however, few were willing to ask what — or who — compelled Pope Francis to weigh in on the matter. If they had, they would have stumbled across the work of an influential figure who, it’s no exaggeration to say, is at the heart of the Vatican’s foreign policy.

Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renowned economist at Columbia University, has been an informal advisor to the Vatican for about a decade. Best known as the author of several books on poverty and climate change, his anti-American views, which entail blaming the US for Russia’s invasion, have seen him largely ostracised in academic and policy circles. Today, you’re more likely to catch him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson than a prestigious journal.

“The Pope is correct that negotiations require moral courage,” Sachs wrote to me in an email last April. “Zelensky showed that in March 2022, but was dissuaded by the US,” he added, reiterating the disputed account that the US and the UK forced Ukraine to turn down an almost done deal with Russia that would have ended the war. “Now, in my personal view, the US should show moral courage in recognising its mistake of pushing Nato enlargement.”

Although Francis has balanced his pacifist statements by occasionally praising “brave” Ukrainians, and has tactically backtracked following waves of criticism, the parallels between the Pope and Sachs on foreign policy are striking. Since the 2022 invasion, the Pontiff has said that “Nato barking at Russia’s gate” ended up “facilitating” Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, has celebrated the legacy of the “great, enlightened Russian empire”, and has managed to alienate even Ukrainian Catholics. It is perhaps no surprise that, in Kyiv, the Vatican is largely considered pro-Russian.

On the war in the Middle East, meanwhile, Sachs has lamented that “the US is complicit in the genocide in Gaza”, while the Holy See described Israel’s response to October 7 as “inhuman” less than a week after Hamas carried out its attack. Sachs’s friendliness toward Xi Jinping’s China — he assured that, unlike in Gaza, no genocide is under way in Xinjiang — also dovetails with the current position of the Holy See, which signed (and then renewed) a much-discussed agreement with the regime.

And as Vatican officials and scholars advising the Holy See have told me, these converging views are no coincidence. They point out that Sachs was credited as one of the main authors of Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si on the environment, and advised the Holy See on topics such as sustainable development, the climate crisis and economic inequality — striving to provide a scientific framework to the Pope’s moral authority. For years, he has been lecturing and consulting with top Vatican officials, reportedly visiting Rome as often as twice a month. The 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti on fraternity and social friendship took up the themes of solidarity and the multipolar world that Sachs has devoted himself to in recent years. In 2021, he was named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a prestigious academic body assisting the Church in developing its social doctrine. Pretty impressive for a non-Catholic raised in a Jewish family.

“A quite impressive recognition for a non-Catholic raised in a Jewish family.”

“The Pope relies on many advisers on political and economic issues, but certainly Sachs’s influence on the Pope’s inner circle has grown significantly during the last two years,” one Vatican aide told me. According to another official, Sachs’s ability to affect the debate also depends on his formidable fundraising power. Every year, he organises and chairs three major seminars in Rome on topics that Francis holds dear, and he works with donors and partners in order to cover the costs. In March, for instance, he set up a workshop named the Summit of the Future, aiming to link “fraternal economy” and “sustainable development” in a crossover that resembles a mixture of a Gospel and a UN brochure. The event was co-chaired with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN nonprofit created and still run by Sachs.

One of his long-term collaborators is Andrea Illy, CEO of illycaffè, the Italian coffee company known for championing social responsibility. Together they chair the Regenerative Society Foundation, an organisation comprising NGOs, academics, the private sector and “spiritual leaders”, which promotes a whole revolutionary socio-economic model. Illy has assisted Sachs in bringing questions of sustainable development to the forefront of papal matters, having been a speaker at one of Sachs’s workshops in the Vatican.

Among the main promoters of Sachs’s involvement in the Vatican is Stefano Zamagni, a professor of economics at the University of Bologna who led the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences from 2019 to 2023. “Sachs has no special access to the Pope,” Zamagni told me, “but his immense knowledge and authority is recognised by everyone. Because of that, the documents he prepares carry a lot of weight, and the Pope, whose background is not very solid, certainly reads them carefully.”

Zamagni concedes that Sachs is sometimes too extreme, but that’s just a “matter of style, not substance”. Yet Sachs is sure to convey his anti-US views on every available platform, including the TV show of Vladimir Solovyov, Putin’s chief propagandist. Elsewhere, the most aggressive tabloid of the Chinese Communist Party routinely interviews him on major geopolitical issues in order to “counter Western media’s malicious distortions”.

In his quest to become a Western spokesperson for the Global South, he blames the CIA for global turbulence and purports that Covid came out of a US lab. Sachs even floated the idea that the ISIS-K terrorists behind the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow in March 2024 were acting on behalf of the US, as Washington routinely “engages in Jihadi-linked terror, and has done so for decades”.

“He used to be a mainstream economist and made many mistakes,” Zamagni said, referring to the early Nineties, when Sachs and others administered in Poland so-called “shock therapy” — dramatic economic policies employed to suddenly unleash market forces in state-controlled economies — and advised Russia to follow suit. “People don’t say that, but in Russia one million people died as a result of taking away health care coverage granted under the Soviet Union,” Zamagni said. In the end, the lost sheep rejoined the flock.

Sachs was named a professor at Harvard at the age of 28, received 42 honorary doctorates, filmed a documentary with Angelina Jolie, advocated for massive foreign aid to developing countries, applied scientific development principles to rural villages in Africa, fought to end poverty, partnered with George Soros, and worked with Bono in Africa at the height of the musician’s humanitarian career. Like many others before him, Sachs wanted to save the world. He also thought he knew how to do it. Soros believed Sachs had “a certain messianic quality about him”. He would eventually find in Pope Francis a leader who was the epitome of the principles he pursued all his life.

“My sense is that there was a turning point in his life,” Zamagni said. “I believe he went through a crisis and came out enlightened,” he added, praising the conversion-like journey that turned Sachs from torchbearer of neoliberal orthodoxy to leading advocate of the Global South. Others, though, see his apparent shifts as coherent elements of a technocratic framework.

“Sachs’s support for an unregulated free market in the early Nineties may seem to run counter to his current admiration for Xi’s China and other illiberal regimes, but it’s actually consistent with a mindset that puts efficiency before political debate,” says Nadia Urbinati, a professor of political theory at Columbia and colleague of Sachs. “Sachs and others want to reform democracy in order to make it more efficient. The idea, which is increasingly popular, is that democracy’s decision-making process is slow, troublesome and irrational, and therefore needs to be corrected with tools taken from autocracies and hybrid regimes,” Urbinati explained.

These days, Sachs seems desperate to be credited as a prophet of the Global South’s rise against the corrupt — and rapidly collapsing — world order shaped by the West. The very order Sachs worked so hard to build, before realising it was the work of the devil. Perhaps he has found in the Pope the moral inspiration required to re-launch himself into a new endeavour to fix the world’s shortcomings. In the end, the shock therapist, the humanitarian idealist, the conspiracy theorist, the renowned scholar, the messianic thinker and the enabler of autocrats are all facets of the man who thought he knew how to save the world.


Mattia Ferraresi is the managing editor of the Italian daily Domani and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard ’19. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, and other media outlets.

mattiaferraresi

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Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago

Let’s be honest – the Vatican is a sham, a disgraceful means of influence without accountability. When NGOs are cited for their undue influence in political affairs, the Vatican tops the list.

A source of spirituality it is not.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
4 months ago

It would be interesting to get the pillars view on this.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
4 months ago

I wish there were as a rule here whereby if you leave a thumbs down you have to justify it.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
4 months ago

Think of it as a gold star.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
4 months ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

Good point 😀

Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye
4 months ago

“I believe he went through a crisis and came out enlightened,” says Zamagni about Jeffrey Sachs.
When your economic advise leads to economic catastrophe, a personal crisis is in order. However I guess that when you were appointed professor at Harvard at age 28, you can’t conceive that the problem is just with you. It is the whole “Western” ideology – the enlightenment – that must be to blame. And so here he is now, convincing the pope that Putin, Xi and Hamas are the future of mankind, and that the US and Israel are the Jihadist promoters and the genocidaires. So it seems he rather came out “endarkened” from his crisis.
But what about the pope in all this? Surely Bergoglio is a moral beacon of unquestionable integrity. Or … did he also go through a personal crisis that put his integrity in question?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/14/pope-francis-argentina-military-junta

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
4 months ago

The usual collection of half-truths, misquotes, innuendo, slander, and re-writing of history.

R Wright
R Wright
4 months ago

Allowing a leftist secular Jew to act as a Rasputin and implement policy is a bizarre move from the Catholic church.

Rob N
Rob N
4 months ago

While Sachs may have anti American views or even be anti American I am not convinced that blaming the US for, at least, giving Putin an excuse for invading Ukraine is other than realistic.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 months ago

his anti-American views, which entail blaming the US for Russia’s invasion, 
when did it become ‘anti-American’ to notice your country’s complicity in world events? The US was involved in the overthrow of a Moscow-friendly govt. Ukraine is the site of numerous American biolabs. Our govt did dispatch Boris Johnson to squash peace talks.
One doesn’t have to be anti anything to notice obvious reality. Criticize Sachs for things he got wrong, not for those on which he’s right.

Mark Kettlety
Mark Kettlety
4 months ago

I’m a little confused. Re. para 6 above: the Holy See described Israel’s response to October 7 as “inhuman” less than a week after Hamas carried out its attack. 
Yet when I click on the link ‘Israel’s response’ it appears the opposite is the case: Six days after the terrorist attack on Israel, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, describes the attack last Saturday as “inhuman” (Vatican News)
Why would you turn the story around so obviously? It was the Hamas attack described as “inhuman”, not Isreal’s response.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
4 months ago

If you actually watch the interview where the Pope used the “white flag” image, the Pope was responding to the interviewer’s use of those words – he merely picked them up and clarified that he did not mean surrender, but negotiation.
Separately, it is an element of the concept of the ius in bello element of just war, which has been a point of study and discussion by Catholic thinkers since Thomas Aquinas, that an officer and commander must talk surrender if continuing to fight no longer serves any military purpose. Failure to do so constitutes a war crime.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
4 months ago

I think the trick is to win peace negotiations on the battlefield.

Gordon Arta
Gordon Arta
4 months ago

‘Perhaps he has found in the Pope the moral inspiration’. More likely is that he’s found a usefully gullible and senile sock puppet.  

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
4 months ago

Sachs is a complicated character. He is hard to assess, partly for the reasons set out in the piece. But he is right on the button about Ukraine although, to be fair, Ukraine is an easy one to get right.

Rocky Martiano
Rocky Martiano
4 months ago

I stopped reading at ‘Today, you’re more likely to catch him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson than a prestigious journal.’

Paul Boire
Paul Boire
4 months ago

Can’t think of a more difficult vocation in life than to be pope. The truth ultimately about existence is that it is a Person. Why moral law precedes practice in being. The Final Cause.. the ultimate ACT that is the ground of being and all change in the ongoing now, is literally Love. Why we are moved by beauty, truth and goodness. Present to us in His sacraments.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
4 months ago

To not condemn the zionists is to think that thirty odd massacres, an ethnic cleansing and innumerable acts of terrorism perpetrated on the Palestinians by the zionists are acts of irreproachable saintliness and therefore the Palestinians not only have no right to self defence, but they also have no right to their land and property.
I laud the Pope and Prof Sachs for not falling prey to that kind of thinking. There is hope for mankind yet.

Miriam Cotton
Miriam Cotton
3 months ago

An unworthy superficial hit-piece on a man whose intelligence flies straight over the head of this author.