Politics

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

Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

They were outnumbered twelve to one north of Kyiv, and completely outmatched in terms of tanks, planes, artillery—all of it. Outmatched, yet they pushed back those Russian forces that colossally outnumbered them.

What we need now is the George C. Marshall of our era to help us train better than the Chinese and the Russians.

Manchester and Sheffield had to apply to Transport for London for money to allocate to their bus routes. This is so comically bizarre that if you put it in a novel it would seem too silly. But that's how it is.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

The power is amazingly concentrated in Whitehall with very clever technocrats who go into it as their first job. Then they're assigned, aged 24 or 25, things like planning bus routes for Manchester. At the moment, the basic principle in the Treasury is that whatever you do, don't give money to local governments because they will squander it.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

Milton Friedman had a postulate that capital would move into a region hit by an adverse shock. But as soon as you interrogate this postulate, it's manifestly rubbish. When Sheffield's steel industry collapsed, investment didn't flow in saying 'oh good, a depressed region.' It flowed out to the places which were booming and accentuated the divergence.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa