So Manchester and Sheffield had to apply to Transport for London for money to allocate to their bus routes. This is so comically bizarre that if you put it in a novel it would seem too silly. But that's how it is. The power is amazingly concentrated in Whitehall with a few very clever technocrats who go into it as their first job.
— Paul Collier Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in AfricaDepression is depression. Despair is despair. Disappointment is disappointment, and I think it's important for us to have that emotional granularity. Because if I just walk around like the world is right now, 'I'm anxious, I'm anxious,' but I have a hard time believing that everyone is that anxious. I think it's because we don't have granularity in our understanding of emotions, and so we're not communicating our true experiences accurately.
Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.
You must free yourself from the fear of losing something such that you can enjoy that something. If you're afraid of a relationship ending, you'll never be able to enjoy the relationship.
People play Farmville, they don't play Zynga! In the same sense, people don't go to Paramount movies, they go to see Mission Impossible.
There was a significant psychological barrier; people were afraid of making mistakes and ruining their work. But when they saw this engaging, simple game on the screen, they understood what to do and felt successful. It broke down that fear and made people more comfortable with computers.
Those who are suffering the consequences of these price increases are rarely (if at all) responsible for their creation- leading to an exacerbated (and right) sense of injustice.
Today, a fear-based politics has largely replaced the promotion of ideals. Obama's call for 'the audacity of hope' in 2006 now feels quaint. To me, this concession to fear poses a big challenge: how do we recover an aspirational politics?
Morality represents the way we would like the world to work, and economics represents how it actually does work.
No more throwing any old garbage into the Tier 1 bucket and calling it capital: the new standards for common equity are significantly tougher than the old standards for Tier 1 capital in total.
That constant re-entry back into who we are if we're acting like someone, we're not is laborious and exhausting to do over and over.
Marketing is not going to solve a bad product, but it will be an easier and smoother with a good product, with repeat purchases and word of mouth as being the two things that are critical.
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.