From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Three years ago, we were managing 20 cases, but today, that number has escalated to 70. Since our inception, we've dealt with nearly 500 cases. Hostage-taking is an ancient practice and will persist for a long time. This training initiative has developed significantly over recent years, ensuring proper care and attention are afforded to these cases.
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.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.
There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.
The single greatest deficit that Europe faces today is not a budget, current-account or trade deficit… but a growth one. With stronger growth, a lot of these problems would be quite a bit easier to handle, if not to resolve.
I think the biggest risk is the situation with the EMU as I have explained. I can see that this has the potential to derail the world economy in the same way the 2008 credit crisis did.
Torture is defined in international law as the pain suffering that is deliberately inflicted on a person for purposes of interrogation, punishment or any other purpose- and that is severe enough to qualify as torture.
Nuclear weapons continue to be built for basically two reasons: power and prestige. In almost every case where a country has decided to acquire a nuclear weapon they have done it either for power—the power to protect their country from external threats or a desire to project their power in the region.
Today, policies are sold to us largely on the basis of fear, or fear mitigation: from immigration to climate change, from health services to defence. It's less about promoting a progressive vision of the future and more about playing to our fears of what might happen if we don't toe a particular line.
Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.
We're starting to realise that business is a major force in deciding the sort of society we live in- and so the role of business must be more in tune with political, social and moral norms of the day.
When examining the persistence of antisemitism, it's not just about understanding how these ideas endure and are transmitted within the culture. It is also crucial to ask why these ideas are being drawn upon and why we sometimes fail to provide more convincing explanations for the economic, social, and political challenges we face.