Politics

There's this sense that our institutions have failed us. The very rich generally pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class and lower-income individuals. There's a sense that the system is broken, the rules of the game are rigged.

There are three devils that inhibit economic growth. The first is that the government takes up too much of the economy. The second is that taxes take too much out of the economy. And the third is that there's too much regulation.

However much we would like to pursue a 'be kind' policy, we have to recognize that there are others in the world who are going to eat our lunch if we don't do our best.

Nobody ever has control of all of the levers, and nobody ever has complete information. But also, there's always the day after. When dealing with really difficult issues it's very easy to get stuck in the moment and to lose sight of where we do want to be five or ten years from now.

I am never again going to accept a box of Ferrero Rocher from anyone. We need to do away with the idea of what diplomats do and how they work. Being diplomatic in the sense of not really saying what you mean or softening the message—it's been absolutely essential to be clear and precise.

When you're trying to understand the motivations of people, quite often understanding the emotional drivers is at least as important as understanding the facts that took them there. In the case of Putin and the people around him, it's resentment and it's anger and it's determination to recover something they believe they lost.

History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, the second as a farce. I think one of the things I have learned with history is that it's important to study it, but it will rarely give you the right answer. Quite often because there is no right answer, and what you're really looking for is to understand how you got here.

The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

The less we engage with those who think differently, the more we demonise them. That demonisation can become dehumanising, reinforcing the idea that we have nothing in common. Worse still, when someone dares to engage across ideological lines, they risk being branded a traitor by their own group.

Director of Stanford Law School's Negotiation and Mediation program

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.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

The French Revolution really is this incredible hinge in the story of Western political thought. For a long time, it was just taken for granted that the French Revolution was the starting point of political modernity.

Revolution was, in a way, the original problem of political thought. Constitutionalism is a Greek answer to the problem of revolution. You want to avoid revolution? Then you need to design a constitution in a certain way—so that it's balanced and less likely to be overturned by revolution.

We have to get out of this 'tax to spend' mentality and think about using resources to create investment funds that support local businesses, while also expecting to get something back as those businesses appreciate.

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

There is an honest trade-off between labour market protection and learning. If you have an extremely static labour market—like the high protection laws in France or Spain—you get stability, but you sacrifice learning. You pay a 'learning cost' for that 'stability dividend.'

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

The Trump phenomenon isn't just a blip—there's a genuine rupture across the Atlantic. So, what does that mean in practice? It means we need to protect some of our own sovereign infrastructure—our own sovereign cloud—especially for utilities, security, and intelligence.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

We're not just over-reliant—we're wholly reliant—on American technology across the entire stack. Our data sits in American cloud infrastructure; our hardware is American designed; our software and operating systems are overwhelmingly American; most of the AI systems people interact with are American, and so on.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader