This week on our Masters in Business radio podcast, we speak with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. He is the author of numerous best selling books, most recently, Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable.
We had a far reaching conversation, covering everything from globalization to technology to infrastructure development to income inequality; he describes what recent U.S. Presidents did right and wrong — and this discussion is likely to surprise you.
Sachs discusses the Easterlin paradox, a concept in “happiness economics,” which notes that a higher level of a country’s per capita gross domestic product did not correlate with greater self-reported levels of happiness among citizens of a country. The general economic discontent is fodder for a discussion on government priorities and how we should solve economic problems.
He discusses how he approached the Bush White House about a $3 billion project to stem the tide of AIDS in Africa, which Bush not only embraced, but subsequently called his “greatest legacy.”
Books discussed are after the jump.
Listen to the show live on Bloomberg Radio. The full podcast can be heard on iTunes, SoundCloud and on Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts can be found on iTunes, Soundcloud, and Bloomberg.
Next week, we speak with Professor Scott Galloway (again) of NYU Stern School of Business.
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Second Edition by Marc Levinson
Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by Mckenzie Funk
The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey Sachs
The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs
Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable by Jeffrey Sachs
