Politics

I don't think it's a coincidence that globally, we're having the biggest crisis of democracy since the 1930s. At the same time as we're finding it hard to focus and pay attention, we also can't listen to each other and sustain our attention on collective problems.

Journalist and author known for books on addiction and depression

As a collective, we tend to look at progress as being linear, especially where it concerns women's rights. This is a huge mistake and breeds complacency because we risk losing the hard-won gains.

Women in Iran are quite possibly the greatest threat to the regime, they are courageous and relentless in their pursuit of justice, human rights, and freedom from oppression and make the sacrifices needed to bring about change for future generations.

One of the key things to look out for is the centralisation of power – in most of the places we see conflict, there is highly centralised power, and often few checks and balances on whoever is in control. Unchecked interests can lead people to ignore the costs of war.

Economist specializing in conflict, development, and poverty research

We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.

Economist specializing in conflict, development, and poverty research

There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.

Economist specializing in conflict, development, and poverty research

We do fight a lot of the time. The United States has been at war with somebody (in an active, intensive, pitched-battling sense) for many years of its existence but- importantly- not with most of its potential adversaries. Peace is not so unusual, and perhaps we should also not overestimate the frequency and likelihood of war.

Economist specializing in conflict, development, and poverty research

Some political conversations are necessary, think about conversations on race or gender, there aren't 'sides' to take when we're talking about human dignity. Instead of focusing on trying to change someone's mind, we can focus on speaking from a place of curiosity. Trying to change other people is a fool's errand – we can have some influence on how people behave, but if your goal is to change their mind, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Harvard Business Review contributor & workplace dynamics expert

We have made the mistake to centralise too much. Whether that's the US federal government or whether that's the EU, I very much believe in the subsidiarity principle, which is we should be deciding things at the lowest possible level.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

Central banks all around the world have essentially abused the power of printing money, and they have abused it by using quantitative easing, meaning creating new federal money to kit over fundamental problems, structural problems in the economy. So much of that acceleration in the wealth inequality has come from this quantitative easing.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We need to get out of the peacetime footing that we are on and we need to get onto a wartime footing against this climate crisis. During World War II, the US allocated 50% of GDP roughly to fighting, and I believe we need to get to 50% of GDP sustained over 5 to 10 years.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We are now trapping in the Earth's atmospheric oceanic system that used to go into space dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases which is equal to four Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs per second. Imagine for a moment if we had alien spaceships hovering above earth, dropping four Hiroshima nuclear bombs into our atmosphere every second. What would we do? We would drop everything until we got rid of them.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We run the very real risk now, not of going back to the 1970s, but of going back to the 1930s or 40s with economic and financial collapse, massive pandemic, and real-world wars.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, there is uncertainty like we've never seen before. We are not only facing economic risks, but real social, political, geopolitical, technological, and environmental risks too.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

I have grey hair, I'm 64. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. When I grew-up, I never worried about nuclear war, global pandemic, technology destroying jobs, climate change destroying the world, or stable democracies being taken over by authoritarian extremists.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

Putin badly miscalculated his chances of quick success in launching his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But I think he will make a much sounder calculation of the costs to him of taking the action of using WMD.