Economics

We are seeing the emergence, development and evolution of entire monetary systems live, unfolding before our eyes. You have Bitcoin and Ethereum and can imagine them as international monetary systems that bring-together local ecosystems. We used to have gold as a key reserve asset, and now it's the US dollar.

The potential for blockchain is to accelerate the digitization of financial markets. Blockchain gets everyone excited as it has the potential to convene these different parties together to reach the necessary agreements, in that sense it is a unique enabler, a coordination mechanism. That has massive implications on the structure of our financial markets.

Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer

I should say right away that I am very much a cryptocurrency sceptic. My judgement is that the dangers of cryptocurrencies do not outweigh the benefits. Cryptocurrency can interfere with governments' ability to fight recessions with monetary policy. When people are using privately created money rather than ordinary money, the money supply is beyond the government's control, and monetary policy can no longer be conducted.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer

There are two key features of blockchain that make it, potentially, a very useful technology from an economic perspective. First, the data about transactions are posted on many public sites thus giving these data an immutability that makes disputes easy to avoid. Second, although the data are in some sense public, they can be encrypted so that a particular party learns only those aspects that she needs to know.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer

We believed, and took on board the promise of growth, that it would even things up again, that it would clean up after itself, and that actually was a panacea to many of our economic ills. Yet, all the evidence has shown us that growth does not even things up- some of the richest countries in the world are becoming immensely unequal and we have seen that growth certainly doesn't clean-up after itself.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

What's unnerving is that when students learn about this character (rational economic man), over time they begin to value self-interest and competition over altruism and collaboration. These models are performative. When we say rational economic man, we become more like him. Who we tell ourselves we are, shapes who we become…

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

The economy is a subset of society, it's a social construct. It's entirely created by humanity- by the way we interact with one another to meet our wants and needs and human society itself is embedded in the living world, we are part of nature whether we like it or not- and we have to respect the rest of nature.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

Economics depicts humanity as a character called rational, economic man. I'd say he has to be a man- he has no dependants. He's a man standing alone with money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head and nature at his feet. When we show-up, we're told that we're competitive and self-interested, the traits of the market.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

GDP only catches a slice of the value that we value. It captures what goes on in the market, the financial value of goods and services sold in an economy over a year. In the boxing match between free market laissez-faire capitalists and state loving socialists the economic debate ignored the household – which is expected to provide the food, do the cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping, education, look after the sick and elderly, yet is completely missing from GDP.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

Until the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy had been measured in tonnes of grain and steel, and because of the crash- economists and politicians decided they wanted some grip over the scale of output of the economy- so they turned to a brilliant young scientist called Simon Kuznets and asked him how they should be measuring economic output. His answer was published in 1930s- he figured out a way to add-up all the tonnes of grains and steel and create a national income figure. He gave the caveat that it would scarcely be taken as the measure of welfare of a nation because it didn't include all the value created in a community, all the unpaid caring work at home, and only measured what was sold- not what was used-up!

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

It's really complicated to work-out how much of our wealth came from empire, it's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake. It's better to look at individual wealth and businesses.

British journalist and author, wrote "The Boy with the Topknot

It's only the latest iteration of post-1980s capitalism which has disconnected us so much from the common good, our collective interest in care and compassion. Before that, capitalism wasn't really like that – and if you think about the style of capitalism we observe in continental Europe and Asia – there's been a much higher emphasis on community.

Economist & Author on Globalization, Corporate Power & Digital Society

The neo-liberal capitalist mindset has also been a huge contributor to loneliness. Since the 1980s, alongside Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, a new form of economics came to the fore which enshrined the pursuit of self-interest over the pursuit of collective good. That generated the mindset we see today- me first, dog-eat-dog, greed is good… that inevitably begets a world where people feel less connected to each-other, more atomised, and many ended up feeling marginalised and unseen.

Economist & Author on Globalization, Corporate Power & Digital Society

Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? The ideal human profile of capitalism does not fit with our basic human dignity.

Turkish journalist, author, and political commentator known for critical writings on democracy

I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. Today, we have a USDT on Tron Network. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning. Future generations will handle their payments through cryptocurrencies and all the settlements will be on blockchain.

Founder of TRON blockchain platform & cryptocurrency entrepreneur