After an appearance with Lloyd Blankfein at LaGuardia Community College this morning, I asked Bloomberg about the school’s partnership with Goldman Sachs (GS), whose executives are now teaching business techniques to small business entrepreneurs.
The mayor defended the company and said, generally, the private sector knows better than the public sector.
“In the end, businesses understand the real world, in a ways that governments do not,” said the mayor. “And it is businesses like Goldman Sachs that can really teach young people what they need to know better than government can.”
He went on to say, “What the federal government does and what the state government does is sometimes counterproductive because they really don’t have the understanding what’s needed at the local level in a ways that mayor’s do. I’ve given that talk before.”
The mayor has long been a proponent of infusing government with private sector thinking, but the transition isn’t always seamless–as in the recent case of Cathie Black, whose success as a magazine executive did not translate especially well to the chancellorship of New York City’s public schools.