Wisdom in fragments

Human beings can become impaired through physical, mental or sensory limitations; but that does not become a disability until that impairment stops them from participating in community life.

Disability Rights Activist & Founder of the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People

It is the difference between an investor asking, 'so, what's your product…' and 'so, what's your idea, and what steps can we take to turn that into a product.'

Viewing entrepreneurship as experimentation allows individuals and societies to evaluate businesses and technologies in domains with greater uncertainty than otherwise possible, unlocking deep growth opportunities.

Entrepreneurs and investors must make discrete choices, often with quite incomplete information and uncertainty about the future, about which ideas to progress and which to shut down. Financiers rather than markets dictate which projects are realized, as they choose which experiments to attempt, how to interpret the results, and whether to continue or abandon the investment.

Loose monetary policy today may be setting up the conditions for a jobless recovery in the future. Even today, the outlines of such a situation are already visible. The knowledge that weaker demand for labour lies ahead affects consumption demand directly and indirectly, as it puts further downward pressure on wages.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist & Critic of Globalization

There are many in Europe and America who believe that our current troubles arise from excess debt, at both the household and national level. Those focusing on debt at the national level have warned that debt financed spending will in the long run be counterproductive.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist & Critic of Globalization

While the crisis made the problems of the euro-structure clear, they were present long before. Indeed, the euro helped create the crisis: for the markets seemed to have vastly overestimated the extent to which the single market/single currency had reduced risk (another example of market irrationality), leading to excessive lending to the afflicted countries.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist & Critic of Globalization

The representative agent model (and its descendants) imposed a straightjacket that made it difficult to think clearly about what was going on [in the economy]… To me [Stiglitz], the strangest aspect of modern macroeconomics was that the central banks were using a model in which banks and financial markets played no role.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist & Critic of Globalization

The most successful organisations I've met over the years have a very-strong senses of culture (even from start-up stage). This isn't the soft process of drafting a mission statement for your website, but genuinely understanding the type of personality you want your company to have.

When you've founded a business, the last thing you want to do is let-go. It's part of the psychology of most founders- but let-go you must, and if you handle it right, it can work extremely well.

Delegation is about giving the right people in your organisation the ability to excel at what they do, and in turn- to help you (as a company leader) to achieve the objectives of your enterprise.

You need to hire people who are smart, ideally smarter than you. There's a reason Google, Apple and their peers are filled with PhD's. The smarter your team (whether academically, or in experience) the more they will deliver.

To make those markets work well, they have to make the market thick, they have to attract enough participants to get good transaction levels. They have to deal with the problem of congestion that can be symptomatic of thick markets. You have to also make the market safe enough for people to transact in!

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

I use the word repugnance to describe transactions that some people would like to engage in, that other people would not like them to; it's often hard to pin-down what harm the transaction does to anyone else.

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

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.

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

Markets are human artefacts; however we often treat them as natural phenomenon in the same way we might treat a language. Markets are emergent phenomenon too, but individual market-places have proprietors and groups of users and therefore markets are more amenable to change. When something isn't working, we can change the rules!

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory