Politics

Fundamentally, the real way to tackle bubble-formation is through careful understanding and regulation of how financial products are created and traded, not necessarily regulating the capital structure of the markets themselves.

Classic economic theory simply will not allow governments and regulatory bodies to deal with bubbles effectively, as they will grow to tremendous sizes immensely fast, meaning that the amount of support needed when they burst vastly exceeds the value of most economies.

We are no longer sovereign-islands protected by fortified walls and arbitrary map-lines- we are an interconnected global family who depend on each other in incredibly profound ways.

Even the most untrained eye can sense the degrees of discrimination seen in foreign policy responses to natural disasters and conflict. Discrimination which can only rationally be explained by morally abhorrent flaws in foreign-policy.

The twenty million people who currently need assistance in Pakistan are not terrorists, nor of strategic importance for our governments. They are much more important than that, they are people like you and me- men, women, families, children- who only want the best for their lives, and who were already struggling with immense poverty, even before nature yielded a blow.

And a country that stops its citizens having access to Facebook, say, or Google or Skype, faces real disadvantages – from inward investment to domestic discontent…

Cambridge computer scientist specializing in security engineering and cryptography

[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control.

Cambridge computer scientist specializing in security engineering and cryptography

And the overall picture that's emerging is that the controls which still work operate more along corporate boundaries than along national boundaries. In order to censor YouTube, for example, countries like Turkey and Pakistan had to block access to the whole site; it's not practical just to block selected content.

Cambridge computer scientist specializing in security engineering and cryptography

organisations will often behave in international economic theatres (such as China) with the same operational processes and assumptions as their 'home' environments (such as Australia) with the assumed protection of the legal, political and other systems of their 'home' environments.

In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.

Philosopher Known for "Beyond Good and Evil" & Critique of Morality

One basis for society is that of helping your neighbour — but in the software world this is piracy. To prevent this, the U.S. is putting in place practices which are like those in the former Soviet Union — computerized guards, propaganda in favour of licensing, rewards for informing on co-workers, and penalties which make distributing software as serious a crime

Founder of Free Software Movement & Creator of GNU Project

What I believe is the bigger benefit; is that it makes it much more difficult for governments to trick the domestic financial system to favour particular borrowers, to milk savers through variable interest rates and so forth.

Leading economist specializing in European monetary integration and financial crises.

When countries integrate themselves, they provide 'favours' resulting in wider and better opportunities for all and similarly, borrowers can tap the world pool of savings and they are supposed to benefit from that. That is the theory, though empirically, there is little evidence of these effects.

Leading economist specializing in European monetary integration and financial crises.

All participants in a society have a responsibility to it's social contract.

Governments are keen to levy brutal taxes on the very engines that create the market for goods and services; lowering their propensity to spend and invest by removing the surpluses they would normally use to do so.

Unfair taxation cripples economic development in a manner not dissimilar to third-world economic corruption.