From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If power is bestowed on someone, there's always the risk of exploitation. It's our collective responsibility as a society to establish boundaries and guidelines. We must push for government regulation.
The more pronounced a group identity is, especially when an identifiable outgroup exists, the more likely individuals are to dehumanize those not in their group.
There's a great quote that is 'political correctness is tyranny with manners'.
While the crisis made the problems of the euro-structure clear, they were present long before. Indeed, the euro helped create the crisis: for the markets seemed to have vastly overestimated the extent to which the single market/single currency had reduced risk (another example of market irrationality), leading to excessive lending to the afflicted countries.
I remain a technical optimist… the problem is not artificial intelligence, it's natural stupidity. Through treaties, regimes and pressure we have at least stopped ourselves from the worst excesses in chemical, biological and nuclear science.
It is impossible to have the World Bank type of policy that is saying one policy fits all – educate your population, adopt better institutions, adopt family planning, and this will be the rescue. On the contrary, resources are limited, and we need to target the elements that are creating hurdles in the development of each country.
Taxes are the price of civilisation.
Fear is a great weapon, and tyrants use fear against their people to encourage them to vote for increases in military spending, even when infrastructure, education and healthcare are suffering.
The police never talk to us, they ignore us, they don't think we're human in this area.
For us, for our people, who were under communist domination, we were comfortable and happy to take on a European identity when we gained independence. Identity is something incredibly personal; and how the individual combines their national and European identity is something they do themselves.
If the government is too abrupt is abandoning a century-old social convention, it will destabilize inflation expectations, introduce a risk premium into bond pricing, and generally induce unexpected macroeconomic instabilities.
Our story, our fight, the story of President Zelenskyy… these all come together in the story of how everyone is capable of more than the world expects of them, and what we expected of ourselves. It's only when we were asked what price we were prepared to pay that we found the truth; we were prepared to pay with our lives.