COLUMN ONE : Cowboy of Poland’s Economy : Ah, to be 35, American and Solidarity’s most influential adviser. Jeffrey Sachs and his critics alike agree it’s downright scary.

When high school senior Jeffrey Sachs visited Washington in 1972, he sent his girlfriend a postcard of the White House. On the back he wrote: “Home at last.”

No, Sachs isn’t running the United States yet. But give him time. After all, he’s only 35, and he’s already helping to run Poland.

Sachs is still as precocious as ever; now, as a globe-trotting Harvard economist and the leading Western economic consultant to Poland’s Solidarity-led government, he likes to say, “I’m a controversial figure in Poland right now.” He adds that his personal role model as he shapes his career mixing East-West politics and global economics is John Maynard Keynes--the most famous and influential economist of the 20th Century.

“My interest has always been in having an effect on public policy,” Sachs says.

But the difference between the Jeffrey Sachs who was valedictorian of Oak Park High in suburban Detroit and the Jeffrey Sachs of today is that his powerful ambition has finally found a remarkable, even historic, outlet: Sachs has emerged as the American intellectual force behind Poland’s stunning decision to cut the Gordian knot of Marxism-Leninism.

At Sachs’ urging, the Polish government has introduced a series of radical reforms designed to speed Poland toward a free-market economy, faster and with more reckless abandon than any other country in the splintering East Bloc.

Sachs, a risk-taker, has thus persuaded Poland to gamble its future on one gigantic roll of the dice. Poland will become either an economic model for the rest of Eastern Europe to follow, or a cautionary example for reformers from East Berlin to Prague. Sachs’ personal reputation in the rarefied world of international economics, where he already has his share of critics, is clearly riding on the success or failure of the Polish reforms.

Yet Poland is only the most dramatic case in the growing list of sick countries that have lined up to ask Sachs for a cure. In the mid-1980s, Bolivia whipped its hyper-inflation after adhering to Sachs’ prescriptions, and Yugoslavia has just hired him to help its faltering state-run economy.

So now, as he shuttles between his quiet campus life here and a series of exotic capitals in the Second and Third Worlds--from La Paz to Warsaw--Sachs is quickly becoming known as the “Indiana Jones of economics”--the bookish professor turned controversial economic adventurer.

“What I’m doing,” says Sachs, with notable understatement, “is a bit unusual professionally. It raises eyebrows. “

In person, Sachs hardly looks the part of the economic cowboy. He’s a short and slightly pudgy father of two small children--and half of a two-income yuppie couple with live-in help who often takes his wife and kids in tow on his overseas jaunts; his daughter has already learned to hate the drinking water in Warsaw. He does much of his work at his home in one of Boston’s toniest suburban neighborhoods, where he has an office off his bedroom stuffed with personal computers, fax machines and other electronic gadgets to keep him in constant touch with the world.

Rarely has an American economist played such a critical role in shaping world events, especially one so young and one who has never held any position in government.

And certainly, few economists have ever found themselves quite so directly involved at such a pivotal moment in history--as Sachs now finds himself in Poland.

“He has become very important in Poland,” observes Bartek Kaminski, a Polish specialist at the University of Maryland.

“He is very influential in Poland, perhaps unduly so,” complains one Sachs critic, Jan Vanoush, research director of PlanEcon, a Washington-based research and consulting firm that specializes in East Bloc economies.

On New Year’s Day, Poland did what Sachs had been recommending for months and went “cold turkey”--the government brought to a sudden and harsh end the nation’s ossified system of price controls and other subsidies in order to force some market-driven logic onto the nation’s Communist economy, which was on the verge of collapse.

Going cold turkey--rather than following a more gradual and conservative approach to reform--will either foster a quick transformation to Western-style capitalist democracy or plunge Poland into economic chaos.

“We are in the beginning of a very frightening episode,” Sachs concedes.

So now, more than a month after what economists call Poland’s “Big Bang,” the world is waiting to see what Sachs has wrought.

“This is a very scary period. You are in a situation with a lot of imponderables,” noted Robert Lawrence, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “No one has ever done this before.”

Already, Sachs’ bold formulas and his enormous influence in Poland have prompted charges from other economists that he is mis-using his new-found power, while also subtly working to keep other economists out of the political mix in Warsaw.

Sachs has set up a “one-man show” in Poland and is offering advice that has been “very irresponsible,” charges Vanoush.

Vanoush is now a consultant for Czechoslovakia but is working as part of a large team of Western economists there; he thinks Sachs should call for backup in Poland as well. “I wouldn’t have the audacity to do what Sachs is doing,” he sniffs.

Sachs certainly isn’t shy about admitting that he has far more influence in Poland than any other Western economist. “There are other people there, and some of them are actually offering useful advice,” says a caustic Sachs. “But no one else is as close to the (Solidarity) leadership.”

Yet Vanoush still wonders whether an American academic should be given so much freedom to use Poland as a laboratory to test out his economic theories.

“It’s very dangerous to get someone from an ivory tower at an Ivy League school who is going to advise a country like Poland that the best thing to do is to go straight from Point A to Point B. I question whether Poland can survive the trip and arrive alive at the other end.”

Other economists also wonder about Sachs’ relative inexperience in dealing with Soviet-style countries. At Harvard--where he has been on a leave of absence from his teaching duties while he helps the Poles--Sachs has specialized in the international debt crisis and hyper-inflation in the Third World, rather than on the economics of the Soviet empire. His best-known hands-on work--until Poland and Yugoslavia called--has been in Latin America, not behind the Iron Curtain.

As a result, some question whether Sachs understands how a country that lacks the basic ingredients of a capitalistic society, and which is still dominated by huge, state-run industrial monopolies, will respond to a sudden, arctic blast from the free market.

“My first reaction to his recommendations, when he became very popular in Poland last summer, was that he didn’t seem to to be fully aware of the institutions in a Communist country and the implications they have for this stabilization program,” Kaminski notes.

“This time, it’s not just prices that Sachs must deal with, as he did in helping tame Bolivia’s runaway inflation,” adds Lawrence of Brookings. “It’s also coping with the decentralization of an economy when there isn’t any competition” in the economy. “That’s the key problem.”

Sachs is the first to acknowledge that the Solidarity plan will require Poland to endure real pain and hardship in the short run. Yet he argues that Poland, which was already mired in a severe economic crisis before the policies went into effect--with an inflation rate of more than 50% a month--had little choice.

“Solidarity is not starting from a stable situation,” Sachs insists. “They had a hyper-inflation on their hands, and that is an extraordinary beast. So everything has to be judged against a background of chaos and rapidly declining living standards even before Solidarity came to power.

“Many reporters are asking, ‘My God, how can Solidarity do this?’ But it’s really a question of, compared to what?”

The pain hit almost immediately. As expected, the government’s New Year’s measures led to a sudden surge in prices, compounding the hyper-inflation. Since Jan. 1, food prices have doubled, while the price of coal--the most critical component in Poland’s energy supply--is now six times higher than it was in December.

Wages, which had been soaring in step with last year’s hyper-inflation, can no longer keep up; so real personal income, after inflation, is plunging.

But all of that had been envisioned by Sachs. “It was always predictable that January would be very tough,” he notes. “You go into this knowing that wages won’t be able to rise as fast as prices. That’s the whole idea.”

In fact, his plan relies on just such an initial shock to be effective. Higher prices should force consumers to buy fewer goods, and, it is hoped, stir greater production. Thus, with less demand and greater supply, prices will eventually stabilize, and the hyper-inflation will be beaten.

To convince the Polish people that the plan makes sense--that prices won’t keep rising forever--Sachs has become a key salesman within Poland for the reform measures. He has given a series of public speeches in the country and gone on Polish television to explain what is happening.

For many Poles, having a Harvard economist backing up Solidarity has given “the plan a seal of approval,” according to Kaminski.

“Many of the Polish economists working with Solidarity had always felt that a radical approach was needed,” Kaminski adds. “But nobody dared formulate it in such a way before. Then Jeff Sachs came and said the same things.” That “made them more confident and gave them legitimacy. He strengthened their hand within Solidarity.”

Yet for the self-confident Sachs, his new role on the world stage is a natural outgrowth of his life’s ambition to combine the theory of economics with the hard edge of practical politics.

Sachs, whose grandparents emigrated from a section of Poland since swallowed up by the Soviet Union, is the son of a prominent Detroit labor attorney active in Democratic politics. As a child, Sachs was constantly reminded by his father to “do good while you are doing well,” recalls his sister, Time magazine reporter Andrea Sachs.

A brilliant math student, Sachs sailed through Harvard’s undergraduate economics program. After briefly flirting with the idea of becoming a lawyer like his father, he turned down Harvard Law in favor of economics, later joining the Harvard faculty as an international specialist.

Sachs rose quickly in the often-ignored field of international economics--most American economists prefer instead to concentrate on the United States. “One of my pet peeves with American economists is that their studies usually begin and end with the American economy,” says Sachs.

Soon Sachs gained a reputation as one of the leading American academic experts on the Third World debt crisis; he has since given Poland the controversial advice that it should not repay its crushing $40 billion foreign debt, arguing that the newly free Polish people should not be punished for the excesses of the Communist past.

In 1985, Sachs’ big break onto the global stage came when he participated in a Harvard seminar on the Bolivian economy. An impressed group of young Bolivian leaders in attendance invited him to help their country out of its hyper-inflationary crisis.

Eventually, Sachs became a close adviser to Bolivia’s president, shaping a bold plan to pull the nation out of its economic morass. With Sachs’ help, Bolivia went cold turkey, experienced brief pain, and then saw its prices stabilize.

Sachs “played the critical role in the design of a program that brought an end to hyper-inflation in Bolivia,” observes Dwight Perkins, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development, who has also worked in Bolivia.

Sachs’ success in Bolivia brought him to the attention of other developing nations as an expert on runaway inflation; Sachs said he has visited or worked in every country in the world that suffered from hyper-inflation in the 1980s.

And so, early last year, as Poland sank further and further into an inflationary crisis, the call went out to Sachs from the country’s tottering Communist leadership.

Sachs turned down that initial request for help, insisting that he would not work in Poland until Solidarity was legalized.

“Three weeks later, they called me back and said Solidarity was about to be legalized,” recalls Sachs.

He arrived in Poland just as Solidarity was forging a role for itself in a power-sharing formula with the Communists. Soon, Sachs shifted from working with the old government to consulting full-time for Solidarity, which went on to win the watershed elections that led it into control of the government.

Now, as he commutes between Boston and Warsaw--with his expenses privately financed by a Hungarian-born New York financier--Sachs acknowledges that Poland is still not even close to getting out of the woods.

In the wake of the January price shock, workers are likely to press for big pay boosts, warns Sachs, even though the government’s economic plan seeks to keep a lid on wages. When that happens, Solidarity will probably be faced with two tough alternatives--give in to labor and perpetuate a sickening wage-price spiral or risk massive strikes that could threaten Poland’s political stability.

Says Sachs: “Poland is coming to that knife’s edge now.”