Wisdom in fragments

We are living longer and measuring GDP growth is not the way to decide whether a society or an economy are flourishing.

How many years or months do we have to be surprised before we realise it's not a surprise that this is a regular pattern? We will have massive waves of forced displacement.

Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right. We're confident that if we have children, they will live long lives as well and we've never had those trends before in all human history.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.

The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.

If you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft. Occupations would require incomprehensible skills, and life expectancy would instantaneously double.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Over this 99.9% of human existence, when technology advances, population advances and counterbalances any potential increase in human prosperity. Suddenly once technological progress reaches a tipping point, families start to invest in education, they economise on the number of children, and technological progress is converted into richer people rather than into more people.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed. I describe it as the mystery of growth, namely what generated this dramatic transformation in the standard of living over the past 200 years after literally 300,000 years of stagnation?

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual.

Magical thinking is a bi-product of cognitive process that were useful in our evolutionary survival. We're so good at seeing patterns that we see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist.

We have to be aware of our cognitive fallacies to build some immunity to our cognitive traps. We can never get rid of our bias, but we can be more aware of it.

Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.

Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this.

NFTs allow game economies to be open. Instead of everything existing in – say – Fortnite's ecosystem, NFTs allow interoperability between games. You could take a sword from one game and move it to another.

Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSea, leading NFT marketplace platform

For the creator economy, NFTs represent a way for creators and producers of content to directly engage with the people who support them. It's a completely different model… a way for artists and creators to monetise much more effectively than incumbent platforms.

Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSea, leading NFT marketplace platform