From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.
The Federal Reserve has, historically, used the discount rate as a tool to 'test' market reactions to monetary policy. We are in extremely volatile markets, and raising the discount rate allows the Fed to observe the reaction their actions will have once they are reflected in the core 'Funds Rate'.
more Americans died in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined…
The only serious mechanisms which have made progress in this sense are growth, microfinance and democracy. Economic growth will naturally have some spill-over to the poor, democracy helps transparency together with political consciousness and microfinance helps the very poor to develop their own business and allows them to control their own lives without expecting the help of anyone.
Disability – rather than being something looked upon as a 'condition', is really a phenomenon that occurs at a complex intersection between our humanity, policy, society, culture and the environment.
It is very common in politics that each party assume the other party cheated in every election if they lose. It's not that republicans are more suspicious than democrats or vice versa, but their constructive paranoia leads them to believe that the other party is doing something sinister.
In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations. We have problems, of course, but this is one of our huge strengths, and a huge foreign policy asset.
a country that stops its citizens having access to Facebook, say, or Google or Skype, faces real disadvantages – from inward investment to domestic discontent…
The sad reality is that if we tried to pass that declaration today, the UN General Assembly would fail to do so. Firstly, we don't have someone like Eleanor Roosevelt as an advocate for human rights, and where previously the US played a leadership role, Trump would no doubt block virtually every human rights pillar associated with the declaration.
Saying people have the ability to participate in decisions, and actually ensuring they can, should not be mutually exclusive. Our nations, economies and companies can perform far better where we genuinely allow and encourage participation in governance and policy from all stakeholders.
Once the cancer of authoritarianism gets into the veins and organs of society, it's not easy to get-out – they have this very specific way of paralysing political mechanisms and dismantling the fundamental human logic.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase freedoms… just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph and the telephone did before.