Today’s Solutions: December 19, 2025

The profession of economics should guide society how best to use available resources to create an optimal outcome for people and environment. But it’s terribly failing at that, according to Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University. Sachs says that economics is obsessed with “completely unimportant things” and as a result is not doing what it should be doing: helping people. In his view the problem started centuries ago. Back then, economics went off track by embracing “a profoundly flawed model of human nature and therefore a flawed model of human purpose.” Economics is a field “that doesn’t know where it’s heading” because it doesn’t know “what the good is.” Read on for some good and inspiring thinking.

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