2016年12月21日 星期三

Carl Icahn, Jeffrey Sachs, Rhett Butler

Strident China Critic Named by Trump to Lead Trade Office

Peter Navarro will lead a new White House office that will oversee trade policy. Donald J. Trump also said the billionaire investor Carl Icahn would serve as a special adviser.




Icahn Concedes Defeat, Compares Dell's Board to Dictatorship and Rhett Butler


 Icahn 是買股票進入Dell 電腦公司董事會想獲大利的介入型產業"鯊魚".維權投資者伊坎放棄控制戴爾的努力
 長達14個月以槓桿收購方式將戴爾公司私有化之路終於走到了盡頭,因為維權投資者伊坎表示,不再尋求任何控制該公司的進一步努力。





 Rhett Butler 是小說/電影"飄"的男主角: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhett_Butler



*****
傑佛瑞·大衛·薩克斯英文Jeffrey David Sachs,1954年11月5日 ),出生於美國密西根州底特律,美國經濟學家,以擔任拉丁美洲東歐前南斯拉夫前蘇聯亞洲非洲的經濟顧問而聞名。現為哥倫比亞大學地球研究所的教授及所長,同時為聯合國秘書長潘基文的特別顧問。從2002年2006年,他擔任當時聯合國秘書長科菲·安南的特別顧問及聯合國千年計劃的總負責人。
曾提出「休克療法」(雖然他自己並不喜歡這個名稱)做為玻利維亞波蘭俄國經濟危機的解決方法。他曾與國際機構合作,幫助發展中國家處理減少貧窮、債務減免和疾病控制——特別是愛滋病——的問題,而因此聞名。他是唯一一個屢次為《時代雜誌》獲選為世界最具影響力學者的人,也被指定為2007年英國BBC芮斯講座的講者。

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2007/
Homepage of the Reith Lectures 2007 given by Jeffrey Sachs entitled Bursting at the Seams.

專欄作家

一個經濟學家和他消除貧困的志向


尼娜·芒克(Nina Munk)的新書《理想主義者》(The Idealist)講的是著名經濟學家傑弗里·薩克斯(Jeffrey Sachs)和他「對消除貧困的追求」,正如書的副標題所示。我知道,這個副標題聽起來像是出版業中典型的誇張之辭,但是,就這本書而言卻非如此。那的確 是薩克斯試圖在做的事情。他是否在獲得成功才是棘手的問題。


News for Jeffrey Sachs

  1. Huffington Post ‎- 3 days ago
    Sachs's office window was streaked with rain. He had spent nearly two hours answering my questions, and they were starting to irritate him.
薩克斯是哥倫比亞大學地球研究所(Earth Institute at Columbia University)所長,他對消除貧困的追求始於2005年,當時他啟動了一項雄心勃勃的計劃,名為「千禧村項目」(Millennium Villages Project)。他和他的團隊選擇了撒哈拉以南非洲的幾個村落,在那裡實施農業、衛生和教育等方面的一系列「干預」行動。他們的想法是:這些村莊將向非 洲乃至世界展示,這塊大陸怎樣才能擺脫極端貧困的枷鎖,這種枷鎖束縛了在那裡居住的大多數人。
  • 檢視大圖 喬·諾切拉
    Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
    喬·諾切拉
從一開始,千禧村項目就備受爭議。它耗費了大量金錢——最 初的種子資金是1.2億美元(按現今匯率算約合人民幣7.3億元)。批評者們認為,這些資金可以用在更有針對性的、不那麼耀眼的援助項目上。由於薩克斯多 年來一直拒絕嚴格比較他的村莊和沒有得到同類幫助的村莊的發展成果(他說那是出於道德上的考慮),發展領域的專家們抱怨說,大家無從知曉該項目是否真有作 用。
「千禧村項目實現了其目標的科學證據為零,」邁克爾·克萊 門斯(Michael Clemens)說,他是全球發展中心(Center for Global Developmen)的資深研究員,也是薩克斯的主要批評者之一。而薩克斯站在自己的角度堅稱,千禧村項目獲得了巨大成功,以至於該項目的干預行動如今 正在被模仿,在烏干達等國,在政府的幫助下得以「擴大規模」。
說尼娜·芒克迴避了薩克斯及其批評者之間的爭論也不完全對。不過,她主要從一個不同的角度來審視千禧村項目。過去六年間,她一次又一次地前往非洲,親眼去看薩克斯的實驗如何開展。她尤其關注了兩個村莊:肯雅的德爾圖(Dertu)和烏干達的盧西拉(Ruhiira)。
「傑夫是個很有魅力的人,我想相信他。」不久前芒克對我說 (她和我曾在《財富》雜誌共事數年)。她毫不猶豫地給予他應得的稱讚,比如,他充滿熱情地倡導免費發送塗有殺蟲劑的蚊帳,這個耗資數百萬美元的做法,是肆 虐當地的瘧疾疫情正得到緩解的一個重要原因。但她的實地報道也讓她看到所有西方援助工作都可能會遇到的困難,從而不再抱有幻想,也不再自以為是。
在幾乎每一項干預行動上,她都看到了村民和項目運作者之間 存在的鴻溝。千禧村項目曾一度勸說盧西拉的農民種植玉米,而不是當地傳統作物青香蕉(matoke)。「結果太好了,」她寫道,玉米獲得了大豐收。問題是 這些玉米沒有買主,結果大部分被老鼠吃掉了。在德爾圖,薩克斯的工作人員決定應該設立一個家畜市場。但這也以失敗告終。說服村民做小生意的努力在很大程度 上不成功。解決把乾淨的水送到村裡這個關鍵問題的成本極高。
芒克報道說,最終,千禧村項目放棄了德爾圖,而盧西拉如今 被稱讚為該項目最成功的試點村之一。「毫無疑問,盧西拉村民的生活得到了改善。」芒克告訴我,「那是我親眼看到的。」但她不敢確定這種改善有什麼意義,如 果你給一個孤立的非洲村落注入數百萬美元,那裡村民的生活將會變得更好,除此之外還能怎樣。(薩克斯的捍衛者說,她的報道大部分都是在該項目站穩腳跟之前 做的)。
這就是問題所在。薩克斯的目標從來都比這更高,他不只想幫 助少數村莊。他想在整個非洲留下他的印記。不久前我跟他交談時,他說那就是已經開始發生的事情,多虧伊斯蘭發展銀行(Islamic Development Bank)提供的逾1億美元的貸款。但是當我去看新聞發佈時,發現烏干達「擴大規模」所涉及的資金不到1000萬美元,這筆錢其實很少,不大可能轉變該國 的面貌。
非洲的狀況正在改善,這一點不可否認。兒童死亡率下降了, 極端貧困人口的數量也有所減少。美國國際開發署(United States Agency for International Development)的前首席經濟學家史蒂夫·拉德萊特(Steve Radelet)在其著作《新興的非洲》(Emerging Africa)中,將這些歸功於更民主的政府、由公務員和商人構成的新階層,以及更合理的經濟政策。不過,薩克斯卻希望我們相信,千禧村項目才是非洲狀況 改善的主要推動力,因為它給大家展示了道路。
《理想主義者》這本書讓我們很難相信原因是後者。
翻譯:土土



Fighting Poverty, and Critics

Nina Munk’s new book, “The Idealist,” is about the well-known economist Jeffrey Sachs and his “quest to end poverty,” as the subtitle puts it. I know: That subtitle sounds like classic book-industry hyperbole, but, in this case, it’s not. That really is what Sachs has been trying to do. The question of whether or not he is succeeding is where things get tricky.
The quest began in 2005, when Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, started an ambitious program called the Millennium Villages Project. He and his team chose a handful of sub-Saharan African villages, where they imposed a series of “interventions” in such areas as agriculture, health and education. The idea was that these villages would show Africa — and the world — how the continent could loosen the grip that extreme poverty had on so many of its people.

From the start, the Millennium Villages Project has been controversial. It has soaked up large sums of money — the original seed money was $120 million — which its critics believe could have been better used on more targeted, less grandiose forms of aid. Because Sachs, for years, refused — on ethical grounds, he said — to rigorously compare the results at his villages with villages that didn’t get the same kind of help, development experts complained that there was no way of knowing if the project was making a difference.
“There is zero scientific evidence that the Millennium Villages Project is meetings its goals,” says Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a leading Sachs critic. Sachs, for his part, insists that the Millennium Villages Project has been a roaring success, so much so that its interventions are now being imitated — “scaled up” — in nations like Uganda, with full government support.
It is not quite right to say that Nina Munk has sidestepped the dispute between Sachs and his critics. Mainly, though, she has looked at the Millennium Villages Project through a different lens. She has spent the last half-dozen years traveling back and forth to Africa, to see for herself how the Sachs experiment was unfolding. She focused in particular on two villages: Dertu, Kenya, and Ruhiira, Uganda.
“Jeff is a charismatic man, and I wanted to believe in him,” Munk told me recently. (She and I overlapped at Fortune for several years.) She is quick to give him credit where it is due: for instance, his passionate advocacy for free distribution of insecticide-coated bed nets, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, is an important reason that the scourge of malaria is being reduced. But her reporting also caused her to become disillusioned, and humbled, by the difficulties that any Western aid effort is likely to encounter.
With almost every intervention, she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project. At one point, the Millennium Villages Project persuades the farmers in Ruhiira to grow maize instead of their traditional crop, called matoke. “The results were fantastic,” she reports, a bumper crop. Except there were no buyers for the maize, so most of it wound up being eaten by rats. In Dertu, Sachs’s staff decided it should set up a livestock market. It flopped. Efforts to convince villagers to start small businesses largely failed. The critical problem of getting clean water to the villages was enormously expensive.
Ultimately, reports Munk, Dertu was abandoned by the Millennium Villages Project while Ruhiira is today lauded as one of the project’s most successful villages. “There is no question the lives of people in Ruhiira have been improved,” Munk told me. “I’ve seen it.” But she is dubious about what that means — other than the fact that if you pump millions of dollars into an isolated African village, the villagers’ lives will be better. (Sachs’s defenders say that most of her reporting was done before the project really found its footing.)
And there’s the rub. Sachs has always aimed higher than helping a handful of villages. He wants to put his imprint on all of Africa. When I spoke to him recently, he claimed that is exactly what has been happening, thanks to more than $100 million in loans from the Islamic Development Bank. But when I looked at the press release announcing the “scale up” in Uganda, the money involved was less than $10 million — a pittance, really, and unlikely to transform the country.
That things in Africa are getting better is undeniable. Child mortality is down, as is the number of people living in extreme poverty. In his book, “Emerging Africa,” Steve Radalet, the former chief economist for the United States Agency for International Development, gives credit to such factors as more democratic governments, a new class of civil servants and businesspeople, and sounder economic policies. Sachs, on the other hand, wants us to believe that the main driver has been the Millennium Villages Project, which has shown the way.
“The Idealist” makes it tough to believe it’s the latter.
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs

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