From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In a democracy, an informed citizenry can act as a driving force for more robust and effective foreign policies and strategies related to national security, thereby fostering peace and encouraging prosperity. However, the lack of such comprehensive education has been a stumbling block.
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.
I personally think that it's only the ignorant and populism pandering politicians who treat the hedge fund industry as a scapegoat for the financial crisis. It was the extremely heavily regulated investment banks who, risking their shareholders' money, levered their firms up to 40:1!
To change motivation, it is important to give hope and make people believe. But also to give concrete results. It is important to value the positive instead of only highlighting the worst.
The twentieth century has been called the century of the homeless man. The number of persons permanently displaced for political reasons as a result of wars, treaties or sometimes obscure reason is startling.
The strongest characteristic of art is that it belongs to the individual. Art is an expression of individualism and the opposite of oppressive dogma.
One thing that really helped us was NOT following the IMF prescription, and hence I think the fact that we insisted on having growth (alongside stability) was something that made for a big change in Brazil.
It is impossible to have the World Bank type of policy that is saying one policy fits all – educate your population, adopt better institutions, adopt family planning, and this will be the rescue. On the contrary, resources are limited, and we need to target the elements that are creating hurdles in the development of each country.
Society at large only sporadically pays attention to the extraordinarily despair-producing conditions in which young black poor youth attempt to survive.
While the crisis made the problems of the euro-structure clear, they were present long before. Indeed, the euro helped create the crisis: for the markets seemed to have vastly overestimated the extent to which the single market/single currency had reduced risk (another example of market irrationality), leading to excessive lending to the afflicted countries.
The concentration of power in technology corporations is a moral and political problem that we simply don't have a precedent for. More people use Facebook than speak English for example, so the implications of Facebook, as just one platform, are at the scale of language itself.
The Trump phenomenon isn't just a blip—there's a genuine rupture across the Atlantic. So, what does that mean in practice? It means we need to protect some of our own sovereign infrastructure—our own sovereign cloud—especially for utilities, security, and intelligence.