From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
Even the most untrained eye can sense the degrees of discrimination seen in foreign policy responses to natural disasters and conflict. Discrimination which can only rationally be explained by morally abhorrent flaws in foreign-policy.
Upon experiencing my first miscarriage, I was incredulously told I'd need to endure three consecutive miscarriages before further action would be taken. The idea itself was staggering to me. You wouldn't ask someone to undergo multiple heart attacks or even endure recurrent minor injuries like broken fingers before intervening. Yet, the system requires women to face the trauma of three successive miscarriages.
Hip-hop gives a ground-level view of what it might mean to live under what are nearly warlike conditions in communities that face a myriad of daunting circumstances.
These models depend entirely on government statistics. They automatically leave out many forms of illicit money such as drug trading, human trafficking, some forms of trade mispricing and so forth. That is why we feel our estimates are very conservative.
Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.
You cannot get rid of identities, but you can reform them. You can take a form of identity that's been historically associated with repression and hierarchy, and make it more egalitarian – that's what we've been trying to do with gender.
It took me 10 years to secure a seed round, even with existing customers. Meanwhile, my Columbia peers would raise millions with just a pitch deck. I've had well-meaning partners suggest that appointing a white CEO would make fundraising easier.
What I believe is the bigger benefit; is that it makes it much more difficult for governments to trick the domestic financial system to favour particular borrowers, to milk savers through variable interest rates and so forth.
Having a fiduciary duty implies an undivided loyalty to corporate interests, arguing that it's impossible to hold a fiduciary duty towards stakeholders since they are considered natural adversaries. Thus, according to the law, stakeholders are viewed as opponents.
Racism, like sexism and any other form of discrimination, is an utterly futile exercise… nobody benefits. Societies are better for diversity in all forms, and time and time again we've seen that the more homogenous people become, the less they are able to flourish.
We have come to consider children as either being exploited or subject to charity; we hardly ever consider them as the equal human beings they are, born with certain inalienable rights.