From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
For four decades, real wages for Americans haven't experienced any significant growth. Prior to the pandemic, it was reported by the Brookings Institute that 53 million Americans were trapped in low wage jobs, where their earnings failed to adequately cover their needs. This cyclical deprivation extends beyond monetary constraints, manifesting in heightened levels of stress, health concerns, and impaired cognitive functioning.
One way to think about reserve currencies is to liken them to an operating system for a computer. Today, everybody is on Microsoft… People complain that it crashes, it's slow and so on.. but nobody changes… why? because everybody else is on Microsoft and if you want to exchange files and work together, you have to be on the same platform.
Ultimately, we want to make it unnecessary to be a B Corp – we want it to be just the norm of how all businesses are run, but that means we have to change the rules of the game and the role of business in society.
Over 70% of the labour force in sub-Saharan Africa is involved in agriculture. This means the sector forms a lynch-pin of society.
Roughly speaking, a child born today in a very poor country can expect to live about 40 years, while a child born today in a wealthy country could expect to live about 80 years.
Part of the reason I'm arguing the time is right is because unlike back in the 60s when these ideas about complexity economics were first floated by people like Herbert Simon, we now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better, we know a lot more about how to program models like this.
The genius of the classical economists was to think of economics and politics as the same. Remember, in Smiths' Day, there was no economics faculty, it was political economy. We may need to go back to that.
The case for free trade is much stronger than the case for free capital movement. The case for free capital movement is weak, because financial markets suffer from very serious failures (right now is a nice example of that).
The impact to one's own sense of happiness and prosperity of not being able to afford 'basic' goods is far greater than not being able to afford 'discretionary' goods. By increasing the financial stress on consumers abilities to purchase essentials- the rest of the economy suffers, as people are more likely to hoard than spend.
Today, we have the worst of the 1970s, with multiple different types of negative supply shocks and not just one.
It's really complicated to work-out how much of our wealth came from empire, it's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake. It's better to look at individual wealth and businesses.
One way to think about reserve currencies is to liken them to an operating system for a computer. Today, everybody is on Microsoft... but nobody changes... why? because everybody else is on Microsoft and if you want to exchange files and work together, you have to be on the same platform.