From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
I don't think it was inevitable until the point where the tanks started rolling-in. It was unstoppable at that point… But 20 years ago, would we have realised this was going to happen? My sense would be absolutely not. I say this as someone who participated in a really sincere effort to reach-out to Russia, to include Russia in the cooperative mechanisms that work for us.
We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.
The internet is humanity at scale and without limits; and that will require common goals, and common discussion for us to determine healthy ways forward. The internet is magnified with human will, and we have every opportunity to allow it to become a democratizing force for humanity.
Our strategy is to try and find elements which can create a common ground, a common agenda, which can then build confidence for sides to work together. Often, a common-agenda comes from issues outside the source of the conflict, such as economic and social well-being.
We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.
The essence of the evolving global economic system is that all countries are dependent on one another in some way, and this includes finance. Emerging and developing countries are dependent on capital inflows from developed regions. But developed regions are also dependent on funds from the developing world!
Every reason why we fight reveals a cost that our society ignored. The grisly, terrible costs of fighting are often 'nil' where, for example in the case of a dictator, the leadership is not held to account.
Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.
The old diplomatic model where only representatives of states have a formal role cannot work in today's world. We need open, democratic platforms that allow everyone to participate – it could be a young activist or a business leader, it could be a scientist or an indigenous leader.
We're also at a time where political culture has become popular culture – in other words, it's become a central talking point for everyone… it's become the water cooler conversation – and political comedy and satire have really come to the fore.
We have reason to be optimistic, but until the public get angry enough about homelessness with politicians rather than the homeless, nothing will change. Politicians respond to public opinions that they believe are electorally significant.