Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Professor Sven Beckert for a compelling discussion of his book Capitalism: A Global History, a sweeping account of the economic system that has transformed how we live, work, and organize our societies.

Together, they explore the origins and evolution of capitalism over the past millennium, challenging the idea that it was simply a Western invention. Beckert traces capitalism’s development across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, examining the roles of trade, state power, imperial expansion, slavery, technological change, and labor in shaping the global economy.

The conversation considers how capitalism became the defining economic system of the modern world—and the human costs and inequalities that accompanied its rise. Beckert also examines how capitalism has been shaped by people and communities often left out of traditional histories, from merchants and workers to enslaved people and those who resisted the system.

This episode offers a sweeping new perspective on the history of capitalism, revealing it not as an inevitable or timeless system, but as a relatively recent human creation whose global legacy continues to shape our world today.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and philosopher Professor Steven Nadler for a thought-provoking discussion of Baruch Spinoza and Nadler’s book, Spinoza: Atheist.

Together, they explore Spinoza’s extraordinary life, his excommunication from Amsterdam’s Jewish community, and his groundbreaking ideas about religion, science, politics, and human freedom. At the heart of the conversation is Spinoza’s controversial conception of God: was he an atheist, a pantheist, or something else entirely?

Sachs and Nadler examine Spinoza’s rejection of a personal and providential God, his belief in understanding nature through reason and science, and his vision of morality grounded not in divine reward or punishment, but in virtue, freedom, and human flourishing.

The conversation also explores Spinoza’s connections to Aristotle and Epicurus, his lasting influence on modern thought, and Albert Einstein’s famous admiration for “Spinoza’s God.”

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Sam Dalrymple for a fascinating discussion of his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. Drawing on extensive archival research, personal histories, and overlooked narratives, Dalrymple reveals how the dissolution of the British Raj reshaped a vast region stretching from Yemen and the Gulf to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, giving rise to many of the political fault lines that continue to define the modern world.

Together, they explore the five partitions that fractured the British Indian Empire, including the division of India and Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, the contested futures of Hyderabad and Kashmir, and the often-forgotten connections between South Asia and the Gulf. They examine the human consequences of partition, from mass displacement and divided families to enduring conflicts, militarized borders, and unresolved questions of identity and sovereignty. The conversation also highlights the immense cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of the region and considers how the legacies of empire continue to shape contemporary geopolitics.

This episode offers listeners a powerful rethinking of modern Asian history, challenging conventional narratives and illuminating the imperial roots of many of today's most pressing global challenges. It is a story of migration, memory, conflict, and resilience, one that underscores how understanding the past is essential for imagining a more peaceful and interconnected future.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and tax policy expert Professor Dorothy A. Brown for a thought-provoking discussion of her books, The Whiteness of Wealth and Getting to Reparations. Drawing on decades of research, Brown examines how seemingly race-neutral tax policies have contributed to widening racial wealth disparities in the United States and explores what meaningful economic repair could look like in practice.

Together, they discuss how the U.S. tax system has historically advantaged white households while limiting wealth-building opportunities for Black Americans. The conversation explores the hidden ways tax policy shapes homeownership, education, employment, and intergenerational wealth, as well as the broader historical forces that continue to influence economic inequality today. Brown also outlines her vision for reparations, arguing that confronting the legacy of slavery and systemic discrimination is essential to building a more equitable society.

This episode offers listeners a deeper understanding of the intersection of race, public policy, and economic justice. It challenges conventional assumptions about fairness in the tax code and invites a broader conversation about how societies can address historical harms while creating more inclusive pathways to opportunity and prosperity. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Professor Rana Mitter, for a compelling discussion of his book Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945. Drawing on extensive archival research and long-overlooked sources, Mitter brings to light China’s central, and often underappreciated, role in the global fight against Imperial Japan during World War II.

Together, they explore how China’s prolonged resistance tied down vast numbers of Japanese troops, shaping the broader trajectory of the war in Asia and beyond. They examine the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the fragile alliances between Nationalists and Communists, and the immense human cost borne by Chinese civilians. The conversation also addresses how China’s wartime experience influenced its postwar political order and its place in the emerging international system.

This episode offers listeners a powerful reframing of World War II, challenging Eurocentric narratives and highlighting the global dimensions of the conflict. It is a story of resilience, sacrifice, and strategic complexity, one that continues to shape how we understand China’s role in the world today and the enduring legacy of a “forgotten ally.”

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Books by Rana Mitter
• China’s Role in World War II
• Second Sino-Japanese War
• Invasion of Manchuria 
• Chiang Kai-shek
• Mao Zedong
• Opium Wars in China
• Ezra F. Vogel 
• Marco Polo Bridge Incident
• Chongqhing Bombing
• Wang Jingwei
• Joseph Stilwell
• P5 UN Security Council
• Cairo Conference

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs for a compelling conversation on Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK by James W. Douglass. In this sweeping work, Douglass reexamines the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, arguing that these four leaders were killed not by isolated actors, but within a deeper context of national security power and Cold War politics.

Drawing on extensive documentary evidence, witness testimony, and declassified records, Douglass challenges the official lone-gunman narratives and situates each assassination within a broader struggle between movements for peace and justice and entrenched systems of violence. At the heart of the book is the concept of the “Unspeakable,” a term Douglass uses to describe the hidden structures of power capable of silencing transformative leadership.

Together, they explore how each of these figures, in different ways, broke with prevailing orthodoxies, opposing nuclear brinkmanship, militarism, racism, and war, and how their evolving commitments to peace may have placed them in direct conflict with powerful institutions. 

This episode invites listeners into a profound reconsideration of one of the most turbulent eras in American history. It is a story of conscience and consequence and of how the unresolved traumas of the 1960s continue to echo in political life today.

Footnotes:

• Books by James W. Douglass
• JFK Assassination
• Malcolm X Assassination
• MLK Assassination
• RFK Assassination
• US Central Intelligence Agency
• The Warren Commission Report
• James Jesus Angelton
• Eisenhower Farewell Address 
• Khrushchev and JFK Communications
• Peace on Earth Encyclical Pope John XXIII 
• Lee Harvey Oswald
• David Talbot - The Devils Chessboard
• Dag Hammarskjöld
• Allen Dulles

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Michael J. Carley, retired Professeur at the Université de Montréal, for a discussion of his groundbreaking trilogy on the international crises of the 1930s: Stalin’s Gamble, Stalin’s Failed Alliance, and Stalin’s Great Game. Drawing on decades of archival research, Carley challenges the familiar Cold War narrative that paints Stalin and Hitler as “dual dictators” and instead uncovers a forgotten history of the Soviet Union’s sustained efforts to build a collective security alliance against Nazi Germany.

Sachs and Carley explore how Britain, France, and the United States repeatedly rejected these overtures, shaped by anti-communism, imperial interests, and deep-seated prejudices that cast the USSR - not Hitler - as the greater threat. This strategic blindness, Carley argues, helped pave the way to World War II and has since been obscured by Western historiography and popular culture.

This episode offers listeners a powerful narrative of missed opportunities, ideological blinders, and the consequences of mistrust among great powers. It is a story from the 1930s with striking resonance today, revealing how historical misunderstanding can shape international politics, and how the failures of statecraft then echo in our world now.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Books by Michael J. Carley
• Bolshevik Revolution 
• Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• Maxim Litvinov
• History of the Soviet Union
• Czarist Russian Empire
• Joseph Stalin
• Mein Kampf
• Fascism
• Benito Mussolini

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Yakov M. Rabkin, historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Montreal, for a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion on the history of Zionism, Jewish thought, and the modern state of Israel. Delving into Rabkin’s path-breaking work, including his newest book, Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Zionism, Rabkin and Sachs discuss the early opposition to modern Zionism from many parts of the world Jewry, and the deep theological, political, and cultural divides that Zionism has created in Jewish communities around the world.  

Together, Rabkin and Sachs trace the surprising origins of Zionism in 17th century British Protestantism, and its transformation into a modern political movement in 19th century Europe, led by both British evangelical Protestants and Central and Eastern European secular Jews. They delve into Herzl’s Zionist movement, which faced many Jewish opponents, including rabbinical authorities, assimilated Jews in Western Europe, and socialists who viewed it as a distraction from class struggle. Rabkin and Sachs discuss the pivotal role of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, the Russian revolutionary roots of Israel’s political culture, and the enduring legacies of figures such as Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

The conversation then turns to the present crisis in Israel and Palestine. They discuss the ideologies of Israel’s ruling parties, the rise of Israel’s religious-nationalist movements since 1967, and the role of these ideologies and movements in the ongoing conflict. Rabkin’s scholarship offers listeners a deeply informed narrative of history, religion, and power - shedding a powerful light on the disastrous, ongoing Israel - Palestine conflict.  

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Yakov Rabkin Books 
• Zionism
• Satmar Hasidim
• Christian Zionism
• Isaac Newton’s religious views
• Joseph Priestley
• First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE)
• Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 CE)
• Theodor Herzl
• William Hechler
• Talmud
• Three Oaths (Judaism)
• Pale of Settlement
• General Jewish Labour Bund
• Balfour Declaration
• Edwin Montagu
• Jewish Colonial Trust
• Ze’ev Jabotinsky
• Iron Wall
• Six-Day War (1967)

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor James Romm, classicist and historian at Bard College, for a captivating discussion on one of the most dramatic and fascinating political experiments of the ancient world: Plato’s involvement with power politics in Syracuse (Siracusa). Drawing on Romm’s newest book, Plato and the Tyrant, Sachs and Romm explore the extraordinary story of how the great philosopher Plato attempted over the course of three decades to bring philosophy into the heart of government.

Together, they delve into Plato’s journey to the court of the autocratic ruler Dionysius in ancient Syracuse, where he hoped to transform a tyrant into a philosopher-king. They discuss the political turmoil that unfolded, Plato’s close relationship with the philosophically minded Dion, and how Plato’s experiences deeply shaped his writing of The Republic.  Romm reveals how Plato’s real-world political experiences ultimately informed his later, more sober work The Laws, and how these texts reflect a lifelong quest to define justice, leadership, and the possibility of a virtuous society.

This episode offers listeners a rich narrative of political intrigue, philosophical ambition, and the enduring relevance of Plato’s quest to unite ethics and power - an ancient story with striking implications for our world today.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes: 

• Ancient Greek Philosophy
• Plato
• Authoritarianism
• Autocracy
• Syracuse
• Athens
• Dionysius 
• Dion
• Plato’s Academy
• Aristotle
• The Republic (by Plato)
• The Laws (by Plato)
• Carthage
• Philosopher-King

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Prof. Ilan Pappè, historian at Exeter University, UK, for an in-depth conversation on one of the most enduring and contentious issues of our time: the Israel-Palestine conflict. Drawing on Pappè’s powerful new books—Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic and A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Sachs and Pappè discuss the historical, political, and ideological forces that have shaped the Zionist movement and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.    

Together, they explore how lobbying networks in the UK and US have influenced the foreign policy of both countries, and the role of the UK and US in the Israel-Palestine conflict. They delve into the historical roots of Zionism, the legacy of British colonial rule in Mandatory Palestine, and the role of the US in the Israel-Palestine conflict from the adoption of the UN Partition Plan in 1947 until today. This episode offers listeners a deeper understanding of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine by delving into the historical processes that shaped the conflict during the past century and more. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

Footnotes:

• Zionism
• Israel Palestinian Conflict
• War in Gaza
• Judaism
• Antisemitism
• History of Israel
• History of Palestine
• Settler Colonialism
• Ottoman Empire
• British Imperialism
• Lord Balfour
• Neocons
• UN Resolution 181
• UN Partition Plan for Palestine
• Patrick Wolfe - Elimination of the Local
• 2000 Camp David Summit
• 2024 Protests on University Campuses

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and futurist Ray Kurzweil for a compelling conversation on the accelerating pace of technological change and its profound implications for the future of humanity. In his new book, The Singularity Is Nearer, Kurzweil revisits and updates his groundbreaking predictions on AI & AGI, exponential growth, and human evolution and longevity.

Together, they explore a future where AI rivals human intelligence by 2029, nanotechnology rebuilds the world atom by atom, and our minds merge with the cloud to expand intelligence beyond biological limits. They examine radical life extension, the promise of renewable energy, and how exponential technologies are reshaping industries, reducing poverty, and transforming global well-being. But, they also confront the risks while discussing a vision of the future - both awe-inspiring and cautionary - challenging us to rethink what it means to be human in an age of rapid and relentless innovation.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• AI
• AGI 
• The Singularity is Near 
• Dartmouth Workshop
• Martin Kosinski 
• Neuromed
• Biotechnology
• Frank Rosenblatt
• Perceptron
• Exponential Growth 
• Turing Test
• Longevity 
• Humanoid Robots
• Virtual Reality 
• Neocortex
• Artificial Consciousness

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and American historian Lauren Benton for a discussion on the hidden histories of empires and the lasting impact of imperial violence. In her book, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence Benton uncovers how European powers built and maintained their empires through relentless cycles of raiding, slaving, and plunder—while portraying their conquests as missions of order and peace.

Together, they explore the brutal mechanics of colonial expansion, the blurred lines between war and peace, and how fragile truces paved the way for endless conflict. Was imperial violence an aberration, or did it set the stage for the perpetual wars that define our world today? With insights spanning centuries and continents, this episode confronts the uncomfortable truths about power, violence, and the myths that continue to shape global order.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Imperialism
• International Law
• Empires
• History of Wars
• Law of War
• Long 19th Century
• State of Exception 
• Perpetual War
• Reconquista
• Exterminatory Violence
• 1492: Conquest of Paradise
• War Trueces
• Informal Empire
• Neocolonialism
• British Merchants 
• Policing 
• The Dividing of Africa by Europe
• War Against Tasmanian Aborigines 
• Drone Warfare

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian, Professor Richard Overy for an insightful conversation on one of humanity’s most unsettling questions: Why do we wage war? In his book, Why War? Overy takes us on a journey across time, from the ancient battlefields of the Roman Empire to the devastation of the World Wars and the conflicts shaping our present.

Together, they examine what drives organized violence? Is it hardwired into human nature, or does it stem from competition for resources, power, and security? Drawing on psychology, history, and political strategy, Overy dissects the deep-rooted forces behind war— confronting the stark realities of conflict and examining whether war is an inescapable part of our past—or an unavoidable part of our future. This episode doesn’t shy away from the hard truths—there are no easy answers, and Overy delivers no false hope.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Why Do Humans Make War?
• Statecraft
• Yugoslav Wars
• Aristotelianism
• Barbarian 
• Proxy War
• Peloponnesian Wars
• Thucydides
• Jihad 
• Israeli - Palestinian Conflict
• Nuremberg Trials
• Hermann Goering
• Demagogue of Athens
• Britain Mercantile State
• New Imperialism
• Hobbes Social Contract
• Munich Agreement
• Operation Paperclip
• Stalin’s Rise to Power

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and global security expert Jon Wolfsthal to unravel the stark reality behind the Doomsday Clock - now set at a perilous 89 seconds to midnight. What does this ominous timepiece truly measure, and why has humanity never been closer to catastrophe? Wolfsthal offers a behind-the-scenes look at the decision-making process that determines the clock’s position and insights into how and if we can move the clock further away from midnight. 

Together, they dive deep into the rising threats of nuclear war, climate change, AI-driven warfare, and biological risks, exposing the fragile state of global security. The conversation traces the history of the clock—from moments of de-escalation, like the Cold War’s end, to the unraveling of arms control agreements and the resurgence of dangerous geopolitical tensions. But it’s not all doom and gloom—this episode also lays out real, actionable solutions to push back from the brink and build a safer future. Can world leaders act in time, or are we sleepwalking into disaster? Tune in for a crucial discussion on humanity’s future—before it’s too late.

Footnotes:

• Doomsday Clock
• Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 
• Einstein and the Nuclear Arms Race
• Treaty on the Prohibition Nuclear Weapons
• Ivana Nikolić Hughes
• Nuclear Weapon
• Oppenheimer 
• Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty 
• JFK Peace Speech
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Biowarfare
• Alpha Fold Nobel Prize 
• Dual-use Technology
• Biosafety Level 
• Genetic Engineering
• Disruptive Technologies
• Truman and Oppenheimer
• Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Eugene Rogan, professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford, as they delve into the complex history of the Arab world, from the Ottoman conquest in 1516 to today’s geopolitical crises of the modern Middle East. Through the lens of his acclaimed book The Arabs: A History, Rogan brilliantly examines the long history of foreign domination, the rise of Arab nationalism, the roles of Europe and the US as outside powers, and the unresolved conflicts shaping the Middle East until today.  

Together, they offer us a masterclass in history that sheds light on the urgent questions of war, power, and the possibility of peace in the region. From Ottoman rule to European colonialism, the impact of the Balfour Declaration, and the ongoing Israeli Palestinian conflict, the conversation provides crucial historical context for today’s challenges.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Zionist
• Palestine and Israel Conflict
• British Mandate for Palestine
• Balfour Declaration
• Capture of Cairo (1517)
• Potentates
• Fly Whisk
• Panic of 1819
• Creditor Nation
• Sovereignty
• World War I
• Constantinople Agreement
• The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East
• Balkan Wars
• King Krane Commission
• White Paper of 1939
• Ethnic Cleansing

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and award-winning journalist Annie Jacobsen as they discuss Jacobsen’s chilling and rigorous depiction of nuclear war in her groundbreaking book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. With meticulous research and interviews with military and political insiders, Jacobsen takes us through a riveting, heart-pounding, second-by-second scenario of a world-ending nuclear war.  From the technological aspects of nuclear weapons and missile defense systems to the horrifying and total incapacity of modern society to survive a nuclear onslaught, Jacobsen depicts the razor-thin margin separating us from catastrophe.

Together, they delve into the sobering realities behind nuclear war games, miscalculated missile strikes, and the relentless risks of omnicidal escalation that history and simulations reveal. They reflect on the lessons of Cold War diplomacy, near-miss incidents, and past disarmament efforts. This conversation isn’t just a wake-up call—it’s a rallying cry to face and address the ultimate existential threat of our age: nuclear war. Tune in for a discussion that is as riveting as it is vital.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Nuclear War
• American Security State
• US Weapons Systems
• The Pentagon's Brain
• Operation Paperclip 
• Doomsday Clock
• STRATCOM
• Interceptor Missile
• The Effects of Nuclear Weapons
• Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse
• Thermonuclear Weapon
• Ivy Mike Bomb
• Richard Garwin
• Theodore Postol
• Bolt Out of the Blue Attack
• Americas Satellite System 
• Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
• Nuclear Winter 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist Glenn Diesen as they discuss Professor Diesen’s new book, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order. Professor Diesen explains Europe’s fractured security framework which he believes has steered the continent toward conflict with no clear way to reverse course. The conversation focuses on Ukraine - a nation itself divided within a divided Europe, and a pivotal piece in the deadly geopolitical chess game between NATO and Russia.

Together, they dissect the high-stakes battle between NATO and Russia, where compromise has so far been impossible, and yet where the potential consequences of escalation are catastrophic, up to nuclear war. Join in as they unpack the dynamics of a rapidly changing world order and what these changes portend for the future of war and peace, geopolitics, and global governance.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and retired Air Force Command Chief Master Sergeant Dennis Fritz, a former Pentagon insider, as they explore the extremely important insights in Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal, which uncovers the ugly truths behind the Iraq War in 2003. Drawing from dramatic evidence, Fritz explains how a group of high-level Pentagon officials (a “cabal” in Fritz’s description) in the Bush Jr. Administration manipulated intelligence, pressured other nations, and swayed Congress and public to support a disastrous war. 

Together, they delve into the astounding evidence that Fritz uncovered during his work at the Pentagon while examining the documentary record of the war.  Fritz discovered three reasons for the utterly misguided Iraq War: to restore American “credibility” in the Middle East, to go to war on Israel’s behalf, and to deliver “democracy” at gunpoint. The results were a massive failure on all counts. 

The lessons of the Iraq War remain crucial for our own time, as various lobbies continue to try to manipulate the US into still more unnecessary and reckless wars.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist Aaron Good as they discuss Good’s book, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. Good delves into the breakdown of U.S. democracy, focusing on the continuity of American foreign policy, the erosion of the rule of law, and the concentration of wealth and power among the corporate elite

Together, they uncover the hidden forces shaping American governance, including the creation of a national security state after World War II and the rise of a covert empire. The podcast explores how the U.S. deep state, driven by corporate and security interests, has influenced major events like foreign interventions and political assassinations, and examines the future prospects for restoring democracy in America.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• American Exceptionalism
• New World Order
• Liberal Democracy
• John Locke
• Neoconservatism
• NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
• Putin Interview with French newspaper Le Figaro
• Peace of Westphalia
• Thirty Years’ War
• Hegemony
• Cold War
• Sovereignty
• Napoleonic Wars
• The Economic Consequences of the Peace
• Treaty of Versailles
• Carl Schmitt
• UN Charter
• Deep State
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Covert Operation

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs, Christina Gerhardt and UN Senior Advisor on Small Island Developing States, Simona Marinescu as they discuss human induced global warming, the implications of rising sea levels, and Gerhardt’s book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean. This discussion shifts our focus to the frontlines of climate change—low-lying islands and despite contributing the least to global warming, these islands bear the brunt of its impacts. 

Together, they explore the local stories of various islands and coastlines through immersive storytelling, scientific insight, and research from each of their own personal experiences. Join us to learn about the impacts of climate change, tourism, military bases and more on these island economies and their indigenous inhabitants. While the implications for these communities are dire, leave hopeful that there are solutions and approaches being used to protect the cultural heritage and identity of these islands.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• SIDS
• US and China Climate Standoff
• US Climate Negotiations
• Sea Levels Rising 
• Colonialism in SIDS 
• Climatologists 
• Nature based Solutions
• Low Lying Islands 
• Migration with Dignity Policy 
• IPPC
• James Hansen 
• Ice sheets melting 
• Manhattan Fate to Sea Level Rising 
• Internal Displacement on SIDS
• Pact for the Future
• Marshall Plan for SIDS
• Small Islands, Big Oceans
• Tourism effect on SIDS

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Dr. Alfred de Zayas as they discuss de Zayas’s book, Building a Just World Order which delves into the possibility of a democratic and equitable international order, essential for sustainable development and the welfare of future generations

Together, they explore the work of Dr. Alfred de Zayas, the first Independent Expert on a Democratic and Equitable International Order appointed by the UN. They discuss his 14 reports outlining 25 principles for a just global system, including reforms to the UN, human rights protections, and economic justice. Dr. Zayas addresses issues like UN Security Council reforms, the impact of World Bank and IMF policies, and critiques unilateral sanctions. He also advocates for the right to reliable information and accountability on indigenous rights, ecocide, and torture. Tune in for insights on these vital recommendations and the call for ethical politics and human rights

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Please join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and China expert, Jean Dong as they discuss Dong’s fascinating book, Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World: Demystifying Enduring Traditions and Dynamic Constraints. Ms. Dong offers a rich and subtle historical perspective on China’s statecraft, diplomacy, and national objectives.  Her historically based analysis offers us great insights into the new geopolitics of our age. 

 Together, Prof. Sachs and Ms. Dong explore the history and practice of Chinese statecraft, revealing its continuities and changes over long periods of history.  They explore how geographical factors have shaped China's world outlook and approaches to international relations. Join this exciting conversation to gain a deeper understanding of the international politics of our world today. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies
• Song Dynasty 
• Chinese Geography 
• Chinese Statecraft
• Joseph Needham
• China’s Security and Border
• Mao Zedong 
• Ming Dynasty 
• Oil Industry in China 
• Zhou Dynasty 
• Chinese Communist Party
• Communism
• China’s Black Cat, White Cat Diplomacy
• China and US relations 
• Opium Wars 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Monika Wiesak as they discuss one of America's most iconic leaders in, America's Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy. Listen in as they delve into the thrilling saga of a young, audacious visionary who dared to challenge the status quo and redefine the course of history.

Together, they uncover the untold story of courage and sacrifice of JFK’s legacy—one where he embarked on a daring mission to reshape the world order, advocating for decentralized power, global peace, and the rights of every citizen. JFK’s relentless pursuit of justice led him into epic battles against entrenched interests, culminating in a showdown that changed the course of nations. From his crusade for civil rights to his groundbreaking efforts in arms control, JFK’s unwavering commitment to a brighter future for all inspires us to confront deep questions about what it all means for our world today.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• John F. Kennedy 
• Poland’s Fall of Communism
• JFK Civil Rights Speech
• George W Bush Weapons of Mass Destruction 
• JFK’s Peace Speech
• Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
• Civil Rights Act
• “Peace is a Process, a Way of Solving Problems”
• Bob Dylan - Murder Most Foul
• Character Assassination of JFK
• Ted Sorensen
• Khrushchev’s Knot
• Khrushchev and Kennedy Letters
• Anti-Colonialist
• War Mongers
• CIA
• Vietnam and JFK
• JFK Assassination
• Public trust in government during JFK

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs in his conversation with authors James and Tom Risen on their important, new book The Last Honest Man, a gripping biography of Idaho Senator, Frank Church.  The Risens describe the remarkable events of 1975, when Senator Church almost single-handedly took on the CIA and FBI, to hold them accountable for serious crimes that they had committed, including the CIA’s assassination plots and the CIA’s and FBI’s illegal surveillance of American citizens. 

This is an inspiring story of how one idealistic Senator battled the powerful and secretive US security state and temporarily brought it under public scrutiny.  Alas, it is also a profound warning for our own time - as the 1975 Church Committee was the last time in half a century that the CIA has been thoroughly investigated. Tune in for a fascinating discussion of pivotal events 50 years ago and their profound relevance for today. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Bryan Van Norden as they discuss Prof. Van Norden’s book, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. As a leading expert in Chinese philosophy, Prof. Van Norden promotes an inclusive, multicultural approach to philosophical inquiry, and urges educational institutions to uphold cosmopolitan ideals.

Together, they delve into Prof. Van Norden’s powerful critique of American higher education's neglect of philosophical traditions from non-Western cultures, including China, India, and Africa. Prof. Van Norden challenges the long-standing Eurocentric bias of philosophy departments, and advocates a multicultural approach to philosophical inquiry.

Join this Book Club episode to explore a dialogue of Western and Asian philosophy, illustrating the enriching potential of diversity in philosophy. Discover the call for inclusive philosophical inquiry, enjoy a wonderful introduction to Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, and listen in on a conversation that challenges traditional Western notions of wisdom and philosophy.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs and an expert on religious conflict, Richard E. Rubenstein as they discuss Rubenstein’s book, Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages. Rubenstein skillfully guides us through the vivid controversies of the Middle Ages, making the philosophical debates of yesteryear both lively and accessible

Together, they discuss the riveting events that unfolded - sparking riots, initiating heresy trials, and causing seismic shifts within the Catholic Church.Throughout their discussion, you’ll uncover the origins of the age-old tension between reason and religion, a divide that continues to shape contemporary discourse. Listen in to gain insights into the foundational ideas that underpin modern thought, as we traverse the historical landscape where the clash of ancient wisdom and medieval upheaval set the stage for intellectual revolutions yet to come.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

 Footnotes:

• Philosophy
• Aristotle
• When Jesus Became God
• Dark Ages
• Alexander the Great
• The Rise of Christianity
• Ancient Greek Philosophy
• Theologians
• Paganism
• The Golden Age
• Toledo School of Translators
• Aristotelianism
• Plato
• The Double Truth
• Peter Abelard
• Saint Augustine 
• St. Thomas Aquinas
• Albertus Magnus
• Big Bang

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political and media analyst Norman Solomon as they discuss Solomon’s important new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. 

Listen in as Solomon and Sachs explore the intricate interplay between the mainstream media and powerful political forces that promote America’s disastrous “wars of choice” – including the US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and currently the US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine and the US backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.   

Solomon’s book explores how American foreign policy has become one of perpetual war, and how the media systematically hide the tragic human and political consequences of these wars, thereby enabling the US Government to perpetuate these conflicts.

Footnotes:

• Ukraine War
• 2023 Israel-Hamas War
• Vietnam War
• MLK - madness of militarism
• Pseudo-democracy
• Propaganda
• Orwellian
• Political Geology of 1984
• Rules-based Order 
• NATO
• Military-industrial Complex
• Ethnic Cleansing
• NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
• Genocide
• Rashida Tlaib
• South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel at the ICJ
• Common Dreams
• War in Yemen
• Pentagon Papers
• War Profiteering
• Information Warfare - Censorship
• Pentagon Woos Silicon Valley to Join Ranks of Arms Makers

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and economist David Daokui Li as they discuss Professor Li’s brilliant new book, China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict. Listen in as Professor Li explains the deep nature of Chinese politics and economics – based on China’s long history, Confucian culture, and meritocratic political system. 

Together, they delve into a wide-ranging discussion of politics, education, philosophy, culture, and international relations.  Professor Li helps us to understand the similarities and differences in the Chinese and US approaches to politics and economics, and explains how US-Chinese relations can be peaceful, constructive, and beneficial for both countries and the world.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• History of the People’s Republic of China
• Cultural Revolution
• Mao Zedong
• Civil Service of the People's Republic of China
• Meritocracy
• Social Structure in China
• Ancestor Veneration
• Lincoln Portrait, “Fellow Citizens, We Cannot Escape History..”
• Checks and Balances in China
• Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party
• Century of Humiliation 
• Confucianism
• Opium Wars
• Meiji Restoration 
• China-Russia Border
• Ancient Chinese History
• Ezra Vogel 
• Japan-China Relations

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Jessica Rawson, one of the world’s most eminent scholars of China, as they discuss Rawson’s book, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China. Listen in to learn about the roots of Chinese civilization through the stories of twelve grand tombs, each helping to reveal a pivotal phase in China’s history. 

Together, they discuss the political, geographical, technological, and cultural evolution of China. Professor Rawson offers profound and fascinating insights regarding one of the world's great civilizations. With deep insights gleaned from her lifetime of scholarship, and building on the latest archaeological findings, Prof. Rawson sheds light on the deep foundations of China’s unique culture, including the role of ancestor worship, physical geography, and farming systems in shaping China’s civilization. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke as they discuss O’Rourke’s remarkable book, Covert Regime Change.  US foreign policy is based heavily on trying to overthrow foreign governments, and O’Rourke’s account is a powerful and deeply scholarly account of America’s frequent resort to secretive regime-change operations. Her book focuses on the Cold War years (1947-1989), but Sachs and O’Rourke bring the issues up to the current day.   

O’Rourke’s highly insightful study offers a deep and rare look at the how’s and why’s of US foreign policy.  Together, Sachs and O’Rourke discuss why U.S. covert regime-change operations have rarely succeeded, but have often left a colossal mess in their wake.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Regime Change
• American Involvement in Regime Change 
• Conspiracy Theories
• Foreign Electoral Intervention
• Kennan and Containment, 1947
• Political Assassinations 
• JFK and the Diem Coup
• List of Coups and Coup Attempts
• List of Revolutions and Rebellions
• John Mearsheimer
•  James Rodney Schlesinger
• Freedom on Information Act
• Obama Attempt to Overthrow Syria 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist John Mearsheimer as they discuss Professor Mearsheimer’s latest book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. Hailed as the most influential foreign policy realist of his generation, Mearsheimer and co-author Prof. Sebastian Rosato provide a groundbreaking examination of a central question in international relations: Do states act rationally?

Together, they discuss the book’s core idea: that states are generally rational in their foreign policymaking, in the sense that they use deliberative processes grounded in plausible theories of the world.  Through a fascinating analysis of historical case studies, Mearsheimer and Rosato argue that states think rationally most of the time, though not always with successful outcomes.

Yet. as Sachs and Mearsheimer discuss, sometimes states do indeed act irrationally - as when the US invaded Iraq in 2003.  In their discussion, Professors Sachs and Mearsheimer cover considerable ground, discussing the World Wars, the Cold War, and the War in Ukraine.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Ukraine War 
• Vladimir Putin
• International Relations 
• Foreign Policy 
• Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire
• NATO
• Wikileaks
• Balance of Power Theory 
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Realist Theory
• Open Door Policy 
• Bush Administration NATO Expansion 
• Hegemony
• Georgia NATO Relations
• Russian December 2021 Ultimatum
• Economic Sanctions

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and economist Francisco Rodriguez as they discuss Professor Rodriguez’s newest publication, The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions. Prof. Rodriguez is an expert on the use of unilateral economic sanctions - when one country imposes economic costs on another, and shares insights on the US as the main user of such unilateral economic sanctions.

Professor Rodriguez offers us a comprehensive assessment of the effects of unilateral sanctions on the living standards in target countries. The effects of sanctions are dramatic: rising poverty, falling living standards, and premature deaths. These consequences go far beyond politics, and hit the civilian population very hard. Professor Sachs and Rodriguez offer a fascinating discussion that sheds light on economic warfare, and how it is deployed in the world today.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Economic Sanctions
• Crisis in Venezuela
• Venezuela Economy  
• The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate
• Hugo Chavez 
• History of the Venezuelan Oil Industry 
• US Economy 
• US Sanctions
• International Financial Statistics 
• US Maximum Pressure
• Nicolás Maduro
• Unilateral Sanctions 
• Secondary Sanctions
• Juan Guaidó
• Citgo
• Sanctions During the Venezuela Crisis
• How Latin America Has Been Shaped by the War in Ukraine
• Diasporas’ Influence on American Economic Sanctions Policy
• UN Security Council
• UN Charter

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and two of the world's leading experts on the economics of wellbeing, Lord Richard Layard and Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve to discuss their newest book, Wellbeing: Science and Policy. Together, they examine how wellbeing can be measured and how it can be promoted today and for future generations.

What produces a happy life and a happy society? Layard’s and De Neve’s new book offers a systematic exploration that brings together a fascinating and vast body of research in the past 20 years. This thought provoking conversation explores the new science of wellbeing and how it can improve public policies and our lives. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• World Happiness Report
• Wellbeing
• Aristotle
• Nicomachean Ethics
• Happiness as GDP
• Martin Seligman
• Subjective Happiness Scale
• Affective Component of Happiness
• Eudaimonia
• Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman
• Stoicism 
• Positive Psychology
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Set point - stable point of genetic disposition 
• Twin studies 
• Mental Health Diagnosis with happiness
• Diminishing marginal of impact on wellbeing
• Community role in happiness 
• Action for Happiness Movement 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Bruce Cumings, renowned historian and  expert in East-Asian history, to discuss Cuming’s book, The Korean War. Together, they discuss the factors that led to the Korean War, its brutal trajectory, and its powerful and fateful impacts US foreign policy. 

The Korean War, though little known or understood today, continues to cast a long shadow on geopolitics and US foreign policy up to this day.  Cumings offers a profound and essential look into a war that is widely misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored, but that still deeply shapes our world.   

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Korean War
• World War II
• American Military in WWII 
• US Second Amendment 
• NSC68
• 38th Parallel 
• Pro-Japanese Collaborators 
• Five Theories of Korean Unification
• Dean Acheson
• Marshall Plan Speech
• Korean War and Japan’s Recovery
• Cold War
• Declaration of Neutrality 
• George Kennan 
• Guerrilla Operations in North Korea 
• US in the Korean War
• American Armed Forces Statistics
• Nuclear Arms Race
• Yellow River Flood
• Relief of Douglas MacArthur
• Trench Warfare 
• Death Count of Korean War

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and bestselling science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, to discuss Robinson’s recent books The Ministry for the Future and New York 2140  for a thought provoking conversation on how climate change has and will potentially affect us all. 

 Together, they explore climate change as an existential threat and the plausible and tumultuous ways the climate crisis will shape our future. What happens as we push beyond planetary boundaries? Will sea levels rise to devastating levels, submerging lower Manhattan and other urban centers of the world? Will climate change lead to acts of terrorism, countries engaging in unilateral geoengineering, and even climate terrorism??  Will UN member states finally get their act together?

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org."

Footnotes:

• COP Meetings
• Paris Agreement 
• UN Member States
• Small Island States 
• 1.5 degree Celsius
• Unanimity Rules
• Decarbonize 
• Capitalism 
• Mass Extinction
• Keynesian
• Tax Structures
• Biosphere
• Sovereign Nation 
• Dystopia
• Utopia

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Chris Coyne, economist and author of In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace, for an eye-opening examination on whether interventionist methods should ever have a place in foreign policy. 

Together, they discuss American imperialism and militaristic culture around the world, proving that nonviolent approaches to domestic and international conflicts not only minimize violence, but also promote cultures of peace throughout the world. Coyne presents his compelling arguments as to why such interventions are a threat to liberal values and alternative methods can preserve freedom and promote security between nations. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Afghanistan Papers 
• Pentagon Papers
• John Quincy Adams 
• Liberalism 
• Joe Biden
• Autocracies 
• January 6th resurrection 
• Manifest Destiny 
• Westward Expansion 
• Imperialism 
• Militarism in the US
• Banana Wars 
• Cronyism
• Adam Smith 
• United Fruit - Guatemala 
• Dulles Brothers 
• Game Theory
• US Surveillance State  
• Church Committee (CIA violating its charter)
• American military spending 
• Capturing Osama Bin Laden 
• US War on Drugs in Afghanistan 
• Taliban 
• Latin American war on drugs 
• Militarism of Drones

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Glenn Denning, a world-leading specialist in agricultural and food policy to discuss Denning’s new book Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet. Together, they explore how we can achieve a food-secure world while protecting the planet through sustainable agricultural technologies, farm practices, and healthy diets.   

Their discussion ranges broadly over the choices of agricultural technology, food policy, dietary choices, and public institutions needed to achieve global food security with environmental sustainability. Denning shares his wealth of personal experiences as an agricultural policy advisor in many parts of the world, and vividly describes pivotal achievements in food policy. He describes vividly how our complex food challenges can be systematically addressed and solved. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Food Security
• Food System Impacts on Climate Change
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Energy System Transformation
• Integrated Rural Development
• Agronomy
• Sustainable Agriculture
• International Rice Institute
• Plant Architecture
• Harvest Index
• IR 8
• IR 36
• Green Revolution Rice Variety
• Philippines 3 Rs - rice roads and arithmetic
• Khmer Rouge
• Gene Bank
• Anthropogenic GreenHouse Gasses 
• Cows Methane Release
• Green House Emissions - Agriculture
• Post Harvard Stewardship
• Social Protection
• Sustainable Intensification
• Thomas Robert Malthus (1798)
• Theory of Change

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Orlando Figes, historian and author of The Crimean War (2012) and his new book, The Story of Russia (2022), in a fascinating discussion of Russian history and ideas about Russian history.

Together, they examine the 19th century Crimean War and the powerful light that the Crimean War, 170 years ago, sheds on the current conflict in Ukraine. More generally, Sachs and Figes explore Russia’s complex relationship with the West, and the ideas that Russian and Western thinkers and politicians have held about Western-Russian international relations throughout history.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Books by Orlando Figes
• Crimean War
• Vladimir Putin
• Anti-Russian Sentiment
• Nicolas II of Russia
• Wars Involving Russia
• Ottoman Empire
• Treaty of Paris 1856
• Lord Palmerston 
• The Crimean War Crises of 1853
• Anglo-Russian War
• Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Soviet Union
• Annexation of Crimea
• Ukraine War 
• Nikita Khrushchev
• Cossacks
• Russian Oligarchs
• NATO

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

In this special episode, join Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Ms. María Fernanda Espinosa, and Professor K. Srinath Reddy for their discussion of The Lancet Commission Report on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Together, they discuss the background to the Commission and the key findings after two years of research. They discuss the possible origins of the virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2; including the possibilities that the virus emerged from laboratory research or from an infected animal in the marketplace. They discuss failures of international cooperation and national public-health policy-making - failures that have contributed to 18 million deaths worldwide from Covid-19.  Most importantly, they discuss the Commission’s recommendations for the future on how to prevent or confront future global health emergencies, most importantly by strengthening WHO as the core pillar of global policy.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Christopher Blattman, to explore the dynamics of war and peace as they discuss Blattman’s, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace.  In his newest book, Blattman argues that violence is not the norm; that there are five reasons why wars break out; and how peacemakers can draw on these reasons to prevent and stop wars.

 Together, they explore the dynamics of war and peace: how communities resolve conflicts, and why such efforts sometimes fail, leading to war. As conflict rages in Ukraine, listen in on this timely and vital conversation to learn more about “Why We Fight" and how we can end wars.

 The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Mao Zedong
• Ukraine War 
• Clausewitz: War as Politics by other Means
• Military History of Russia
• The Rise of Personalist Rule
• Washington as Land Speculator
• French and Indian War
• Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
• Semi-sovereignty
• Game Theory
• Reversed Industrialization 
• Stalemate
• Thucydides Trap
• The Peloponnesian War
• NATO
• War of Attrition 
• Frozen Conflict 
• Autocrat
• Vietnam War
• Volodymyr Zelenskyy
• United Nations Security Council
• International Criminal Court 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and neuroscientist Anil Seth, author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness to explore the hard problem of consciousness. Because the deep puzzles of consciousness can’t be solved head-on with existing scientific methods, Seth aims to gradually “dissolve” the problem by looking at levels of consciousness, the content of consciousness, and the mystery of the sense of self.

Together, they unpack several of the hard questions: How can physical beings have subjective experiences? How can we measure consciousness? Is consciousness the feeling of being alive? 

 The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Consciousness
• Artificial Intelligence
• What Is It Like To Be A Bat? By Thomas Nagel  
• Psychiatric Injury
• Functional Neuroimaging
• Phenomenology Consciousness
• Functional Consciousness
• Behavioral Consciousness 
• Experiential Perception
• Pattern Recognition 
• Self-Driving Vehicles
• Qualia
• Hard Problem of Consciousness
• Panpsychism
• Élan Vital
• EEG, MRI, fMRI
• Locked-In Syndrome 
• Adrian Owen 
• Sense Perception
• Controlled Hallucination
• Chris Frith
• Plato: Allegory of the Cave
• Sensory Nervous System
• William James
• Neural Circuit
• Metacognition 
• Animal Trial
• Machine Consciousness

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Peter H. Lindert, economic historian and author of Making Social Spending Work in which Lindert examines how social spending relates to economic growth in various countries and the emphasis we must place on investing in the young. 

Together, they examine the history of public social spending and address the key challenges around intergenerational inequality and fiscal redistribution, the returns on investment in human capital, how to deal with an aging global population, and whether migration is a cost or a benefit for society. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• The Rise of Social Spending
• Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the 18th Century
• Public Spending on Education
• Sustainable Development Goal 4
• Social Spending 
• Welfare
• Social Expenditure Database
• Adam Smith
• John Locke
• Thomas Malthus
• French Revolution
• Church and State in 21st Century Britain
• The Road to Serfdom
• Authoritarianism
• Free Lunch Puzzle
• Social Democracy
• Universal Health Coverage in the US
• The US Immigration Debate
• Spending on Children and the Elderly
• China’s Hukou System 
• Global Pension Statistics
• Toward a Political Economy of Social Policy
• Hilary W. Hoynes

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Casey Michel, journalist and author of “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.”  In his debut book, Michel offers a deep investigation into how the US built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known.

Together, they examine just how the US implosion into a center of global offshoring took place, what that means for the rest of the world, and its vast implications for those who seek to preserve open societies and the rule of law.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Kleptocracy
• Money Laundering  
• Offshoring
• US as a Tax Haven
• Pandora Papers 
• Panama Papers
• Perpetuity 
• South Dakota is Turning Into a Tax-haven for the Global Elite
• Shell Corporations 
• White Collar Crime 
• USA Patriot Act
• Senator Carl Levin
• International Revenue Service (IRS) 
• How Delaware Became the World’s Biggest Offshore Haven
• Loopholes for Kleptocrats
• The Great American Tax Haven: Why the Super-rich Love South Dakota
• Dynasty Trust
• Biden Administration Launches U.S. Strategy on Countering Corruption
• Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen at the Summit for Democracy
• Counter Kleptocracy Caucus

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Heather Cox Richardson, renowned historian and author of How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America in which Richardson argues that while the North prevailed in the American Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a “new birth of freedom,” democracy’s blood-soaked victory was ephemeral.

Together, they discuss the myth that the Civil War released the US from the grip of oligarchy and the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Colonial America
• Otto Ecktein
• American Civil War
• Oligarchy
• Declaration of Independence
• Edmund Morgan
• “All Men are Created Equal”
• Confederate States of America
• January 6 2021 Insurrection
• Democracy
• Right Wing Politics
• InfoWars
• Demagogue
• FCC Fairness Doctrine
• Facebook Algorithm Regulation
• The True Believer; Eric Hoffer
• Authoritarianism
• Indigenous People of the Americas
• Westward Expansion
• American Cowboy
• Freedmen’s Bureau
• Reconstruction Amendments
• Racial Hierarchy
• Socialism

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

John Professor Jeffrey Sachs and award-winning historian, Dr. Keisha Blain, as they discuss her latest book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America.

Together, they will situate Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks while illustrating how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Civil Rights Movement
• 1964 Democratic National Convention
• Hamer's Testimony at the Democratic National Convention 1964
• White Supremacy
• Voter Suppression in the United States 
• Sharecropping
• Literacy Test
• Jim Crow South
• Apartheid
• Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)
• Lyndon B. Johnson
• Second-class Citizen
• “Mississippi Appendectomy”
• Forced Sterilization
• Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Activist, Savagely Beaten in Mississippi Jail
• Intersectionality
• Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom 
• The Working Poor
• W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
• Dunning School
• American Civil War
• 10 of Hamer's Most Powerful Quotes

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

John Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Corey Robin, political theorist and author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump  in which Robin argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism.

Together, they discuss aspects of such arguments, including the roots of conservatism, and what drives the political right in today's political landscape.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Conservatism
• Edmund Burke
• Letter to a Noble Lord
• French Revolution
• Sarah Palin
• Subaltern
• Social Construction of Gender
• Democratic Governance
• Joseph de Maistre
• Populism
• Modern American Conservatism
• Aristocracy
• Limousine Liberal
• Racial Ideology
• Abolitionism
• Traditionalist Conservatism
• New Left
• Cancel Culture
• ‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics
• Richard Nixon
• Donald Trump
• Reagan Era
• Joe Manchin
• New Deal
• Civil Rights Movement
• Private Sphere
• New Social Movements
• Social Democracy
• Political Institutions

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Eric Foner, as they discuss Foner's latest novel, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.

Together,  they discuss this transformative era in American history, and how the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• The Second Founding 
• 13th, 14th & 15th US Amendments 
• History of the US
• American Civil War 
• Three-fifths Clause
• “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”
• Timeline of the Revolution 
• Plantation States 
• Slavery & Serfdom
• Abraham Lincoln
• Abolitionism
• Fugitive Slave Acts
• Debt Limit
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Marx & Engels on the Civil War
• Birthright Citizenship 
• Insurrection
• Federalism 
• Jurisprudence
• US Electoral Process
• Texas House Passes Voting Bill 
• The Dunning School
• W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
• Jim Crow Laws
• 1619 Project 
• Critical Race Theory
• Mitch McConnell 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

John Professor Jeffrey Sachs and highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, to discuss her latest novel, Not “A Nation of Immigrants.”   

Together they discuss settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the history of erasure and exclusion in the United States while urging the audience to embrace a more complex and honest history, which has typically been left out of traditional American textbooks.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes

• An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
• Immigration to the US
• Settler Colonialism 
• First Immigration Act  - Chinese Exclusion Act 
• Northwest Territory 
• Andrew Jackson 
• Irish Catholic Immigration to America
• Agrarian Civilizations 
•  John Smith 
• Alexander Hamilton 
• Slave Labor 
• Sugar Plantations in the Caribbean 
• Marriage of Elizabeth Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton 
• A Fiscal Military State 
• From Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 24 November 1801
• Doctrine of Discovery 
• City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York
• Ethnic Cleansing in the US 
• A Nation of immigrants - John F Kennedy 
• Civil Rights Movement 
• Red Power Movement 
• Critical Race Theory 

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Rick Perlstein for their discussion of Reaganland.
 
Together they discuss the "Southernization" of American politics, the causes behind U.S. President Ronald Reagan's rise to power in the 1970s, and the way that conservatives’ cutthroat strategies to gain power remain a powerful political force today.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes

• Biography of Barry Goldwater
• Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001)
• Biography of Richard Nixon
• Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)
• Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 (2021)
• Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Biography of Water Cronkite
• Biography of Walter Lippmann
• New Deal
• The End of Ideology
• Biography of Daniel Bell
• Biography Lyndon B. Johnson
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower 
• Biography of Richard Rothstein
• Mason-Dixon Line
• Brown v. Board of Education
• Biography of Storm Thurmond
• Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
• Housing discrimination in the USA
• Biography of Ronald Reagan  
• United Nations Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• Make America great again
• Biography of Bill Clinton
• Biography of Barack Obama 
• Biography of George W. Bush
• Biography of of Donald Trump
• Biography of Karl Max
• 2021 United States Capitol Attack

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!

In this month's episode of the Book Club, Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Patricia Sullivan, a leading civil rights historian, place Robert Kennedy at the center of the movement for racial justice of the 1960s—and show how many of today’s issues can be traced back to that pivotal time in US history.

Prof. Sullivan is the author of this month's featured book Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Biography of Robert F. Kennedy
• American Civil War
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
• Brown vs. Board of Education
• Jim Crow Laws
• Biography of John F. Kennedy
• World War II
• New Deal
• Biography of Ralph Bunche
• Biography of Alexander Bickel
• Biography of Burke Marshall
• Biography of John Doar
• Biography of John M. Patterson
• John F. Kennedy’s televised address to the Nation on Civil Rights on 11 June 1963
• Biography of James Meredith
• Biography of Harry Belafonte
• Biography of James Baldwin
• Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
• Biography of Lyndon B. Johnson
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Watts Riots
• Vietnam War
• Martin Luther King Jr. speech at New York’s Riverside Church on 4 April 1967 
• Robert F. Kennedy’s statement on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on 4 April 1968
• Biography of Malcolm X

⭐️ Thanks for listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs!

📚 Join the conversation and go deeper into the ideas shaping our world.

➡️ Watch the conversation on YouTube 

➡️ Subscribe to the newsletter for episode updates, readings, and behind-the-scenes insights: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS

➡️ Explore past episodes, show notes, and featured books: https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

🎧 Download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

📣 Love the show? Leave a rating and review - it helps more listeners find the podcast.

🔁 Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or book club who’d enjoy the discussion!