Edwin M. Lee: San Francisco’s Future & Resilience
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Having grown up and worked in this environment, I strongly believe there is a solution to everything as long as you are not willing to accept a status quo and constantly look for better results.
Look at Jeff Bezos telling his 1.5 million employees to 'wake up every morning terrified and stay terrified all day.' They're not getting rich; they're barely scraping by. Yet he wants them living in terror so he can get even richer. That's crazy. That's a crazy society and a crazy life.
I believe a key issue is this newfound ability to hide behind our screens, which gives a false sense of impunity, allowing people to express themselves without restraint. Moreover, the surge in social media use seems to be edging out genuine social interactions. The more time we spend glued to our screens, the less we engage in meaningful, real-world exchanges.
Many governments, faced with a popular revolt, have chosen to martyr wealth without realising that it is the source of entrepreneurship, innovation and philanthropy in their economies.
We are facing the mother of all debt crises. When you look at the data on private and public debt, the debt to GDP ratio was near 200% of global GDP in 1999, today it's more like 350% and rising. In advanced economies, it's over 420% and in China, 330% and rising.
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