From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
the printing press helped democratise Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, often before the state had fully democratised.
Our contemporary society uses this statistically insignificant variation to support the 'reasoning' behind cultural, social, economic and political practices that cause hundreds of millions of people, every day, to face discrimination.
Resilience is the responsibility and opportunity of the community. We can either face it and learn from it or we can pretend it's not happening. We have to explicitly face the fact that resilience is the responsibility of all of us, together.
You only get to really redesign markets root and branch when they are failing so dramatically that everyone acknowledges it. Markets are a little like language. It's hard to change the spelling of certain words in the English language, even though those spellings are dysfunctional.
Eliasson strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large.
Much of our learning, expansion, and deepening as humans occur within the realm of connectivity, particularly through the conversations we dare to have when we are most vulnerable and authentic. These discussions change us profoundly.
Philanthropy is very much like business, there's not such a huge difference. In business you have a mission statement, in philanthropy you have a vision. I believe in philanthropy we want to do things that give back as much as we give, otherwise it doesn't have permanence.
In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.
Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.
If one wants to treat societal problems, then philanthropy and government spending are fine. If one wants to cure societal problems, one has got to come up with sustainable solutions- and that means attracting for-profit capital.
Most of the venture backed businesses, and venture capital firms, are a mirror-tocracy not a meritocracy! Senior executives are disproportionately drawn from a narrow stratum of society – in the US, this means Ivy-League Schools such as Stanford. They tend to be overwhelmingly white (and increasingly now Asian) but certainly overwhelmingly male.
The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.