From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When the Sheffield steel industry collapsed, incomes collapsed, and so demand in the region collapsed—businesses of all sorts, not just steel but shops and businesses that sold things to consumers. The consumers were poorer, and so businesses started to fail. Investment didn't flow into this region saying 'oh good, a depressed region.' It flowed out to the places which were booming.
Much of the mistreatment of animals is due to economics; it's cheaper to raise animals for food when they're kept in a confined 'economical' way rather than letting them graze in fields. In my view, we should actually only have the free-range farms – meat would then be more expensive and more people would become vegetarian, vegan, and find alternative protein foods so that we don't cause this terrible animal suffering.
My big contention is that we've misread Adam Smith. People don't realise that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher before an economics expert. His first book, before he wrote 'The Wealth of Nations' was, 'The Theory on Moral Sentiments'. In that book, you find the answer for what the invisible hand really is! He never accelerated the narrative that there should be completely unfettered free markets. He believed markets took place in the context of a moral framework and foundation.
The easiest piece of advice to give, but the hardest to follow- is to not let yourself get swept up in the next bubble. You could have said that about tech stocks in the 90's, housing prices around the world in the early 2000's… but people always got swept up in them. The history of financial bubbles does not give cause for optimism.
The policies they prescribe are a continuation or exaggeration of the previous policies that created the structural problems in the first place. I am therefore relatively pessimistic on the intermediate and longer term outlook for the U.K., the U.S., Spain and other countries where credit was readily available.
Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
Investors who previously thought that sovereigns were a quasi-risk-free asset have been challenged in that respect. Domestic local-currency sovereign debt is certainly not risk-free. It very much depends on the willingness and ability of the sovereign to pay-back its debt!
We will not employ capital unless we can find an opportunity that has a minimum of 50% upside to our intrinsic value over the term of our investment.
The truth is nobody needs a diamond. You don't need a diamond to heat your home, run your car or power your cell-phone. As a business, it's clear to us that there is only one source of value for diamonds- and that is the consumer's desire for the product. 99% of diamond demand is from the jewellery industry, less than 1% goes to industrial uses.
You only get to really redesign markets root and branch when they are failing so dramatically that everyone acknowledges it. Markets are a little like language. It's hard to change the spelling of certain words in the English language, even though those spellings are dysfunctional. Markets that are getting-along but not doing as well as they could are very hard to change.
There is a problem with business leaders and the economics profession where we have celebrated the gains from neoliberal policies whilst only paying lip-service to compensating those left-behind.
For four decades, real wages for Americans haven't experienced any significant growth. Prior to the pandemic, it was reported by the Brookings Institute that 53 million Americans were trapped in low wage jobs, where their earnings failed to adequately cover their needs.