From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Education exponentially multiplies advancements in every other sector. And critically, it empowers communities with the skills to shape their own futures, build their own economies, and advocate for their own rights.
If the disabled workforce was utilised to its full potential, that's an extra £40 billion that could be added to the economy.
Traditional index bond management gives higher index weightings to the most indebted countries, regardless of their capacity to service their debt. A country facing financial hardship and trapped in a debt spiral to remain solvent would see its index weight increase until the whole mechanism collapses.
Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.
Crime itself can increase inequality. A doubling in crime increases the Gini coefficient by 3% to 4%. When crime increases twofold the share of the rich tercile drops by 1.3%, and the share of the population in the poorest tercile increases.
And a country that stops its citizens having access to Facebook, say, or Google or Skype, faces real disadvantages – from inward investment to domestic discontent…
It might feel—if you haven't yet learned the rules of these hidden markets—that the outcomes are based on luck, chance, or things beyond your control, but you actually have a lot more agency in them than you think.
I would essentially start by abandoning everything Osborne set out to do. I would be cutting taxes, not raising them. I would immediately reverse the VAT raise that he had. I would impose those within an hour of taking office.
Toyota's reputation for long-term quality is finished. People aren't going to buy Toyotas, period. It doesn't matter which model. What's happened is sufficient to keep people out of the stores.
When China started its open-door policy, 40 years ago, it was a much different environment. There was nothing to work with! It was a communist system before that, a planned economy, no free market. People started building things from scratch.
In a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
There is nothing, however, in standard theories of money that requires transactions to be anonymous from tax- or law-enforcement authorities. And yet there is a significant body of evidence that a large percentage of currency in most countries, generally well over 50%, is used precisely to hide transactions.