We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.
— Christopher BlattmanMobile phones can really revolutionize the study of human behavior.
It's very clear that the sole purpose of business is not just to make money for shareholders, but actually to look after their employees, their communities and their society. Businesses play a role in society, and they have a voice which they have to use. Silence is not an option.
Empowerment means we are able to sustain hope in a situation that may – to many outsiders – look hopeless.
We cannot focus only on the material aspects of poverty- we must address the poverty of spirit that's present in every one of our broken institutions: health systems, economic systems, criminal justice systems, and food systems. If we are going to solve the toughest problems we face as a world right now, we're going to need new operating principles that are compatible with a deeply interconnected world.
When you've founded a business, the last thing you want to do is let-go. It's part of the psychology of most founders- but let-go you must, and if you handle it right, it can work extremely well.
Each person is trapped in their own world and assume that the rest of humanity sees the world the same way that they do. That assumption is incorrect. You see the world differently to me, and that's true for every situation in which we find ourselves. It's a side-effect of how we're built!
Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.
The fact that you and I are alive is against stupendous odds. One day we will die, and that's sad, but there are people who will never die because they were never born. We're the lucky ones, we get to die. You can only die if you were alive.
The things that are trivially easy for humans turn out to be extraordinarily difficult for machines, and vice versa. I cannot do the square root of a large number in my head, but my pocket calculator can do that instantly. But my pocket calculator still cannot make me a cup of coffee.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world.
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.
Today away from monetary policy, global factors drive inflation, and for tangible goods emerging market drivers are key. We note commodity consumption per unit of GDP explodes as per capita income rises from $3000/yr into the $5000 to $15000 bracket.