From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Many of our health problems challenges cannot be solved within one specific border. In the old days, we had 'tropical medicine' which was a colonial approach. This led to international-health during the cold-wars which simply meant the health of those far away. Now we have the concept of 'global health' which reflects the globalisation of the world.
Engineering life is often less demanding than creating a nuclear weapon, making monitoring more challenging. This complexity underscores the need for the scientific community to actively engage in establishing robust safeguards and developing strategies to prevent bioterrorism.
My impression however is that the rate of change in society is accelerating as a result of rapid developments in science and technology. Science today is a huge, industrial scale activity and has a far greater impact on society than it did a few hundred years ago.
The more pronounced a group identity is, especially when an identifiable outgroup exists, the more likely individuals are to dehumanize those not in their group. When asked to describe oneself, if the first identification that comes to mind is that of the group, the likelihood of outgroup dehumanization increases, seeing them as less than human.
Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised.
The problem is you cannot achieve all three E's simultaneously. Early work in the subfield of market design shows it's very hard and very unlikely you'll get a hidden market that can successfully allocate things efficiently and equitably in a way that's also easy.
While it may seem an altogether preposterous notion that people should have to pay for air, a very basic component of life- one must read this hypothetical tale in context of the fact that over 1.7billion people cannot afford food (also a very basic component of life)- and a similar amount have little access to clean drinking water (another very basic component of life).
It's important that every person you work with, all your colleagues, all your co-workers, leave a company with more skills and economic mobility than when they arrived. Further, it's important the time they spent with you wasn't miserable, that it was great, good, enjoyable.
The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.
Our nations cannot exist independently, we are intrinsically linked to the global economy, and another-nations problems will, invariably, affect us.
Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
We seem to be in a strange period of history where our official world view, our official picture of the universe denies the reality of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value. I think people do feel this at an intuitive level, and it can lead to a deep sense of alienation.