From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Despite huge and on-going technological advances in electronic transactions technologies, it has remained surprisingly durable, even if its major uses seem to be buried in the world underground and illegal economy.
Even though we still have approximately twenty thousand hydrogen bombs in the arsenals of the United States and Russia (many of them ready to use at a moment's notice) the two risks that most experts think are the greatest and most likely are the risks of a single bomb being used by a terrorist group or the risk of a regional war involving dozens of weapons.
Walls are seductive though… what politician hasn't said, 'I can make it like the old-days again…' Bridges sound harder – how do you build them? What will they cost? Who will pay? In truth, build walls almost always yields a negative result.
The will to live together is the fundamental pillar that keeps society going- and that pillar is now under threat. What will we do when we lose the will to live together? That's one of the fundamental questions of our time.
We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
Why don't we start with a fundamental step – ceasing to fund our own downfall? For years, we held onto the belief that welcoming China into the international order would prompt them to abide by established rules, liberalize their economy, and make their governance more democratic.
It's hard for people to defend democracy when it cannot defend them against social injustice.
Research has shown that when you compare the effect of a 1% change in unemployment rate and 1% change in the inflation rate; a 1% increase in unemployment has a bigger impact on people's happiness than a 1% increase in inflation.
The strongest characteristic of art is that it belongs to the individual. Art is an expression of individualism and the opposite of oppressive dogma.
The head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, privately criticised David Cameron and George Osborne before the election for their lack of experience, the lack of depth in their inner circle and their tendency to think about issues only in terms of their electoral impact.
Even if we end up with better regulations, we'll still have 300 million guns washing around the US, and that's going to be a huge problem for decades, because guns last a long time.
The way an orchestra is normally structured is cast in the image of what people in the 18th century thought society should look like. It's very top-down, a hierarchical power structure… reflecting the vision of society at the time. I wanted to subvert that by creating a new orchestral structure that reflected how society could be so it came through the musical DNA.