From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You can't force people to change- you have to find their passion and implement based on that. The economist, Dambisa Moyo, showed that even though $2.5trillion has been invested in aid, Africa is now net-poorer than 50 years ago.
When global markets open up, if you're selling t-shirts in the US or Denmark, you're disadvantaged because countries like Bangladesh produce them more efficiently and cheaply. This has fuelled arguments advocating caution when it comes to free trade. We've conducted what is, to my knowledge, the first study attempting to quantify both the benefits and costs of trade, rather than focusing solely on the benefits.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
The power is amazingly concentrated in Whitehall with very clever technocrats who go into it as their first job. Then they're assigned, aged 24 or 25, things like planning bus routes for Manchester. At the moment, the basic principle in the Treasury is that whatever you do, don't give money to local governments because they will squander it.
A significant hurdle is the underestimation of our collective power. The fossil fuel sector and its substantial influence through lobbying and misinformation, spending $4 billion annually to challenge scientific consensus.
Fear is a great weapon, and tyrants use fear against their people to encourage them to vote for increases in military spending, even when infrastructure, education and healthcare are suffering.
Putin badly miscalculated his chances of quick success in launching his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But I think he will make a much sounder calculation of the costs to him of taking the action of using WMD.
Chairman Bernanke, as good as he is academically, and as much integrity as he has (which I believe is unlimited), has an analytical framework that suggests a lot more inflation is allowable. Part of this is because he looks at core rather than headline, which is a flawed calculus.
The first thing we need is activism. Corruption is a system, and to fight it we must first change the mindset of the population, and that can only happen through activism, through being present in politics, through being elected. You have to be in the media, you have to have a voice, you have to be able to convey your message strongly.
You cannot govern a 21st century globalised business with the management style of an 18th century trading firm. In the same way, the modes (and rationale) of governance must be brought up-to-speed with the nature of the citizens they are responsible for.
If the government is too abrupt is abandoning a century-old social convention, it will destabilize inflation expectations, introduce a risk premium into bond pricing, and generally induce unexpected macroeconomic instabilities.
We must remember that about one-quarter of the planet is under the control of the indigenous communities of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Arctic. Quite frankly, we will never be able to deal with the challenges of the 21st century unless we engage and empower indigenous communities around the world.