Forward Thinking

Co-host Janet Bush talks with Ann Mettler. Mettler is Vice President, Europe, at Breakthrough Energy, working on cleantech innovation in pursuit of a net-zero-emissions future. Before her current role, she worked for many years in European public policy. She was head of the European Political Strategy Center, the in-house think tank of the European Commission, from 2014 to 2019. In this podcast, she covers topics including the following:

• Investing for climate impact
• The challenges in Europe’s clean energy technological ecosystem
• Useful innovation beyond new products
• The new priority of energy security accelerating the net-zero transition

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Co-host Janet Bush talks with Justin Yifu Lin. Lin is dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics, dean of the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, and professor and honorary dean of the National School of Development at Peking University. He served as chief economist at the World Bank from 2008 to 2012, and he actually took up his World Bank position after serving for 15 years as professor and founding director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University. In this podcast, he covers topics including the following:

• What is new structural economics?
• How can emerging economies catch up?
• Is globalization going into reverse?
• Will the economies of China and Asia maintain momentum?

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Co-host Janet Bush talks with Andrew J. Scott. Scott is professor of economics at London Business School; his work focuses on the economics of longevity. He's co-founder of the Longevity Forum and a member of the World Economic Forum's Council on Healthy Aging and Longevity, topics that are very much the focus of the McKinsey Health Institute. His book The 100-Year Life has sold more than a million copies in 15 languages. In this podcast, he covers topics including the following:

• What benefits could greater longevity offer to economies?
• Redefining retirement
• What could be done to help people live healthier for longer

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Cohost Janet Bush talks with Carlos Lopes. He is a professor in the Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town. He’s also an affiliate professor at Sciences Po, Paris, an associate fellow in the Africa Program at Chatham House, and a member of the African Union reform team. Lopes was the policy director for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. He serves as an advisor on MGI’s research on Africa, including our latest report, which discusses the continent’s human capital and natural resources and how they can help to accelerate productivity and reimagine Africa’s economic growth. His views are his own. In this podcast, he covers topics including the following:

• The factors constraining Africa’s potential
• The promise of AI for Africa
• The threat and opportunity of climate change for Africa

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Cohost Michael Chui talks with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, both professors of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. They cover topics including the following:

• Subjective well-being
• How the labor market has evolved since the pandemic
• A decline in inequality
• The potential impact of AI
• Why write a new economics text book?

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Co-host Michael Chui talks with business professor Ethan Mollick. He is an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Mollick covers topics including the following:

• What is generative AI?
• How substantial are the performance improvements workers can gain from using generative AI
• How to use human management skills to get better results from generative AI
• What generative AI means for the future of work and trust
• What he learned when he made the use of generative AI mandatory in his classes

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Co-host Michael Chui talks with economist Hans-Helmut Kotz who is a visiting professor of economics at Harvard University, a senior policy fellow at the Leibniz Institute for financial research at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and on the economics faculty of Freiburg University. Kotz covers topics including the following:

• Parallels between the 2007–09 global financial crisis and today’s financial turbulence.
• The balance that banking regulators need to strike to protect the economy but encourage innovation.
• Being prepared by taking eclectic perspectives.

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Co-host Janet Bush talks with economist Dany Bahar. He is an associate professor of practice of international and public affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute and a senior fellow of the Growth Lab at the Harvard Center for International Development. He’s also a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development. Two themes stand out in his work: the diffusion of technology and knowledge, and migration. In this podcast, Bahar covers topics including the following:

• Why some countries are rich and some are poor
• The role of people on the move in spreading knowledge and raising productivity
• The opportunity of Ukraine’s refugee diaspora
• How companies can reap rewards by integrating migrants

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Co-host Michael Chui talks with Nouriel Roubini. Roubini is professor emeritus of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, a global macroeconomics consultancy. He covers topics including the following:

• The “mother of all” debt crises and what to do about it
• Likely future trends in the global balance sheet—the world’s economic health and wealth
• The trajectory of globalization
• Which “megathreat” worries him most

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Co-host Michael Chui talks with Justin Adams. Adams is the head of partnerships at Just Climate, a climate-led investment business. he answers questions, including:

• How does nature or the ecosystem provide services to the economy?
• How much needs to be invested in nature?
• What role can capitalism play in addressing issues around sustainability?
• What kind of innovations have real potential to mitigate carbon emissions?

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