From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
My greatest fear is that we have learnt nothing. Individually, we have learnt that the longer your population lives healthy, the better off your economy will be.
Seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world are in the USA, one third of all students who leave their countries to study in another come to the USA. There are only a handful of countries who spend relatively more on R&D than the USA.
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.
The Federal Reserve has, historically, used the discount rate as a tool to 'test' market reactions to monetary policy. We are in extremely volatile markets, and raising the discount rate allows the Fed to observe the reaction their actions will have once they are reflected in the core 'Funds Rate'.
If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?
We're moving towards a world of increasing abundance. The poorest and wealthiest can access the same information because of Google; the same information Larry Page has! That same democratisation and demonetisation will occur in other critically important areas of our life.
Markets have an incredible capacity to forget, so who knows if it will stay like that… Markets forget, they get over-leveraged, they extend themselves, we will see other bubbles.
There is a certain conventional wisdom about the way that humanity evolved over time. The puzzling element is that much of the gain that we made in the technological realm were converted into more people, rather than into richer people up until very, very recently. World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed.
There is nothing, however, in standard theories of money that requires transactions to be anonymous from tax- or law-enforcement authorities. And yet there is a significant body of evidence that a large percentage of currency in most countries, generally well over 50%, is used precisely to hide transactions.
Sovereign debt is reasonably unique in that there are no underlying assets one can claim unlike corporate bonds.
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.
Nobody notices a dollar a day disappearing from their payroll, but think of the impact of a thousand people doing that.