From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We estimate with the World Bank that US$20-40 billion each year is lost in developing countries through corruption. If you add to that $5 billion each year in stolen assets, it clearly shows that corruption is a serious obstacle to the achievement of the millennium development goals.
The last quarter century of globalisation has utterly transformed how our markets and nations do business. With that in mind, we have to appreciate that our economies not only provide profound benefits and wealth-creation opportunities, but also hold very real (and untended) existential threats to the livelihoods of billions of citizens.
Why don't we start with a fundamental step – ceasing to fund our own downfall? For years, we held onto the belief that welcoming China into the international order would prompt them to abide by established rules, liberalize their economy, and make their governance more democratic.
More girls have been killed in the past fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century.
We're afraid of living under constant terrorism, and the constant threat of a neighbour who wants to kill you and destroy everything you care about. The escalation is already here. He has already reached a point of escalation that we must not tolerate – he is already doing everything he is capable of.
If you look at the countries in the world that are leading in their levels of reported happiness, it's countries such as the Nordics- Denmark virtually always comes out on top. The countries where people are happiest are ones which are much more domestically oriented and not seeking world-power.
History is not linear, like the chapters of a book… History moves through seasons, and so winters are inevitable.
We are now living with a great deal of uncertainty, which will increase. As a society, we have to be prepared for threats we cannot conceive, we must build resilience not just in developed countries, but particularly in conflict areas.
We mustn't focus exclusively on this threat, and it tends to be the case that the global elite does. I was at Davos in January 2020 and climate change was the agenda – and the pandemic had already begun! It was quite difficult to persuade people that there might be a nearer-term threat facing us than climate change.
In the Fourth Generation war, the state loses its monopoly on war. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Almost everywhere, the state is losing.
Chairman Bernanke, as good as he is academically, and as much integrity as he has (which I believe is unlimited), has an analytical framework that suggests a lot more inflation is allowable. Part of this is because he looks at core rather than headline, which is a flawed calculus.
Governments are keen to levy brutal taxes on the very engines that create the market for goods and services; lowering their propensity to spend and invest by removing the surpluses they would normally use to do so.