Geography and the wealth of nations

Professor Jeffrey D Sachs is coming to the LSE campus on Tuesday 27 October for a public lecture titled Geography and the wealth of nations. He'll be joined by Sir Tim Besley, who's chairing the evening. It's a hybrid one, so you can catch it in person or online if you can't make it into town.

The lecture marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Sachs takes one of Smith's most striking claims — that the discovery of America and the discovery of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind — and runs with it. Drawing on new geospatial datasets, he argues that the observation captures deep truths about long-term global economic change that are still profoundly relevant today. If you've ever wondered how the physical layout of the world shapes who gets rich and why, this is exactly that conversation.

Sachs is a heavy hitter in this field: University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He's served as Special Advisor to three UN Secretaries-General and wrote The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions, which sits right in the wheelhouse of this talk. Besley is just as established on this side of the pond — School Professor of Economics and Political Science and W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics at LSE, and Director of the Huth Initiative for a New Political Economy.

It runs from 6.30pm to 8.00pm on Tuesday 27 October. The venue on the LSE campus will be confirmed for ticketholders closer to the date, and since it's open both in-person and online, you can choose whichever works best for you.