From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There is a significant part of the Greek economy- maybe 30-40%- is not in the 'official' books. That has to be reined in. To put this in context, if that is reined in… to a large extent, the revenue side of the Greek problem would be fixed.
History is full of changes that were only made because of direct action. In the US context, you need look no further than the civil rights movement. Racial segregation would not have been dismantled the way that it was, to the extent that it was without the work of grass roots movements who were prepared to take risks and break the law.
Disability – rather than being something looked upon as a 'condition', is really a phenomenon that occurs at a complex intersection between our humanity, policy, society, culture and the environment.
I've sat in front of the chief ideologue in the Moscow Kremlin, and I remember him saying to us in so many words, that 'you cannot govern Russia unless you have a one-party state: Our job in the Kremlin here and now, is not to recreate the communist party, but it's to recreate the one party which will be the natural choice'. He didn't say it would be the only choice, (but I think that's what he meant), of the Russian electorate.
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.
Corruption destroys societies, hinders development and undermines security. Note what happened in the Middle East and North Africa… corruption was one of the triggers of unrest in these countries. It appears that people are fed-up of corruption, they want change, and they want it now.
The absolute focus must be on reducing inequality. This means creating strategies which provide economic opportunity - investing in industries that provide employment rather than profit, investing in education, and providing a fairer deal for those who form the labour force.
There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.
Fear is a great weapon, and tyrants use fear against their people to encourage them to vote for increases in military spending, even when infrastructure, education and healthcare are suffering.
A lot of governments and corporations have made pledges to be carbon neutral by 2050 without having any way to do it. They don't know how to do it. They don't have the tools to do it. We have found over 1000 solutions that can help.
The net result would certainly be worth the effort as now, more than ever, stakeholders in a fragile global economy from central banks to individual consumers need to know that what they are seeing is, in fact, the truth... the whole truth... and nothing but the truth.
What on earth they [referring to government] will do next…