From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If Russia or China try to fly a plane into the United States, they'll be shut down by a USAF F35. Meanwhile, if they try and fly an information plane into the United States they're met with Facebook and Google algorithms that run an auction to enable them to get the maximum audience, for the cheapest price.
Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.
Our message to countries continues to be: you must take a comprehensive approach. Not testing alone. Not contact tracing alone. Not quarantine alone. Not social distancing alone. Do it all. Any country that looks at the experience of other countries with large epidemics and thinks 'that won't happen to us' is making a deadly mistake. It can happen to any country…
We live in a deeply connected world, and if we want stability and prosperity in our connected world, we have to look after the weakest links as well as the strongest parts.
Complex societies needed repetitive rituals in order to get off the ground. Routinizing rituals makes deviations from the standard script easy to detect. And this means that when people step out of line, they can be sanctioned.
What's remarkable about Israel's economy is that in the last few years we have situations which, in any other country, would have been totally disruptive. The incredible thing is that none of these threats have a measurable impact on our economy!
We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
When you're not in a geopolitical recession, political risk still matters, but it matters largely at a country level and primarily in emerging markets. But in a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
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.
Disasters keep coming along at random intervals, they are not normally distributed. They either come randomly (in the case of war) or they are governed by power-laws (pandemics and earthquakes). That's hard for our brains to deal with… we don't like the idea that history is just a lot of random shocks without any predictable features.
When you contrast that with human rights defenders, they are willing to self-sacrifice, to give everything to defend the community… not just their community, but everyone's rights. Why can't politicians be like that?
Globalisation is here to stay. You cannot, however, look at it as a natural phenomenon on which you have no influence- it's not like a typhoon or a cyclone. It's a process- and a process on which you can have influence.