From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
To change motivation, it is important to give hope and make people believe. But also to give concrete results. It is important to value the positive instead of only highlighting the worst.
Populism is the act of politicising and mobilising ignorance to the point of political and moral insanity.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.
When global markets open up, if you're selling t-shirts in the US or Denmark, you're disadvantaged because countries like Bangladesh produce them more efficiently and cheaply. This has fuelled arguments advocating caution when it comes to free trade. We've conducted what is, to my knowledge, the first study attempting to quantify both the benefits and costs of trade, rather than focusing solely on the benefits.
If you offer no vision for the future, someone else will. Our geopolitics cannot tolerate a vacuum, and if you retreat- whether physically or ideologically- someone else will come up with a plan which may not be complementary for democracy.
I'm surprised that people argue that economic integration causes a loss of identity. In fact, countries get the benefits of their own country (whether it be food, types of goods, technologies) but in-addition, they get the benefits of all the things other countries produce too. Economic integration doesn't remove a country's identity, far from it… rather the range of products, services, instruments and intellectual processes available increases. You keep what you have and add things from abroad. This is not reducing identity, but expanding it.
The ice is neither left nor right, it is neither Republican nor Democrat, it is simply melting. The consequences of the sea ice melting are enormous and will be felt everywhere from Texas to China.
Classic economic theory simply will not allow governments and regulatory bodies to deal with bubbles effectively, as they will grow to tremendous sizes immensely fast, meaning that the amount of support needed when they burst vastly exceeds the value of most economies.
Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.
since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear….
Backlash is sadly an intrinsic part of social progress. When oppressed people make their claim for justice, they trigger a response – a fightback by those who want to maintain the status-quo.
After the Holocaust, such thinking became widely discredited. In the post-war era, other developments also influenced attitudes towards antisemitism, leading to a significant shift in political antisemitism. However, what persisted were the cultural stereotypes – the entrenched narratives and stereotypes about Jews within the culture, ready to be drawn upon whenever they seemed relevant or useful.