From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Public health goes everywhere. Winslow defined it as 'the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organised efforts of society'. I think that's a good start, but we have to see the culture and ecosystem of public health in the context of the community. Not only is happiness important to public health, but so is GDP and the environment. It's an immensely broad subject.
It's clear to me that small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years... particularly through the recession....
There's this sense that our institutions have failed us. The very rich generally pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class and lower-income individuals. There's a sense that the system is broken, the rules of the game are rigged.
We are now at the same crossroads, with impact. There is an interesting parallel here with 1933, when we introduced the GAAP. Until then, there had been no real transparency on profit! After the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, investors sat-up and said 'hey, this is crazy!' and they got transparency through the adoption of GAAP.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning.
In a world where we have 168 million full-time child labourers, we have just over 200 million adults who are jobless. Studies have shown empirically that there is a parallel between child labour and adult unemployment.
The most important thing to me is that wealth has allowed me to live a full life, rich with experiences. I see wealth more as a means to experience than a way to acquire things. It has also given me control over my own time.
Risk of a double dip recession in advanced economies (US, Japan, Eurozone) has now risen to 40%.
What I mean by that is compensation systems- especially for traders- that created go for broke incentives. If you won big, you became fabulously wealthy- and if you lost big- you got a comparative slap across the wrist.
This is transforming the whole of our economy and we are seeing more companies making decisions across those dimensions of risk-return-impact and being judged on the basis of the profit and impact they create. It really turns our economies away from risk-return (where they create profit without counting the huge damage they cause) to risk-return-impact.
A speculative bubble exists when the price of something does not equal its market fundamentals for some period of time for reasons other than random shocks. [Fundamental] is usually argued to be a long-run equilibrium consistent with a general equilibrium
Research has shown that when you compare the effect of a 1% change in unemployment rate and 1% change in the inflation rate; a 1% increase in unemployment has a bigger impact on people's happiness than a 1% increase in inflation.