Economics

Systems change is slow because it requires consensus that there is a system failure to start with, as well as the presence of a viable alternative. This requires a combination of culture shift, behavioral change, and structural change to ultimately change the rules of the game.

Co-Founder of Bridgewater Associates & Pioneer in Radical Transparency

The system we've built has been successful at lifting many people out of poverty, and at creating amazing products and technologies, but it's not solving many of the problems we face today – in fact, rules and culture of our economic have created many of those problems.

Co-Founder of Bridgewater Associates & Pioneer in Radical Transparency

Economics is like artificial intelligence, it's not really there… there's no physical invisible hand…. It's about people interacting with people against a social order, a set of ethics, principles and practices.

Pioneer of Virtual Reality & Critic of Social Media

I actually think social media can be fine, and in fact if you look at the first year or two of any particular social media, they often start out quite charming before the stupid business model kicks in where companies can only make money by having third parties inject money into the system.

Pioneer of Virtual Reality & Critic of Social Media

As a nation, we're missing out by not being more flexible, accommodating and encouraging and I think lockdown has- at least- brought about that one piece of positive change.

Founder and former CEO of Ann Summers lingerie and party plan business

If you view the world from a moral perspective, you have no option but to address climate change in a timely fashion. The good news is that the moral imperative is backed-up by economics, technological advance and capital shifts.

Former UN Climate Change Executive Secretary & Global Climate Action Leader

We can't only rely on consumers making individual choices. If you switched your energy to someone who told you they are selling you 100% renewable energy, that's great, but it doesn't shift the energy system to renewables. You need to have energy markets that are designed to encourage investment into renewable energy.

Environmental lawyer and founder of ClientEarth

Climate change is a real, and present, threat to the economy – and to all classes of national and private assets. If you manage other people's money, you have a fiduciary duty to de-risk it by managing for climate change.

Environmental lawyer and founder of ClientEarth

Once you have transparency on impact, why would you tax all companies for the damage caused by some? You would tax the ones who create the damage. I hope we therefore shift to a fairer taxation system that improves the position of governments.

Founder of Social Venture Network & Pioneer of Social Impact Investing

It really turns our economies away from risk-return (where they create profit without counting the huge damage they cause) to risk-return-impact (where impact is measured alongside profit and reflected in the value of companies).

Founder of Social Venture Network & Pioneer of Social Impact Investing

Out of the 1,800 companies we measured, 250 created more environmental damage a year than profit. 600 created environmental damage of 25% or more of their profits. Together, the 1,800 businesses we researched created over $3 trillion of environmental damage in a single year.

Founder of Social Venture Network & Pioneer of Social Impact Investing

I felt strongly that search- as a product- was just going to continue to face more and more revenue pressure, forcing us to show more and more ads, and inevitably making the product worse over time.

Former Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI

Search started as a free product meaning it cannot get any less expensive for the user. You pay nothing, but the benefits of reaching larger and larger portions of humanity accrue to the provider, not to you.

Former Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI

In the long-term there is no way to reconcile the conflict of interest between serving the user and the advertiser.

Former Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI

Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.

Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics; Mechanism Design Theory Pioneer

The potential for blockchain is to accelerate the digitization of financial markets. Blockchain gets everyone excited as it has the potential to convene these different parties together to reach the necessary agreements, in that sense it is a unique enabler, a coordination mechanism. That has massive implications on the structure of our financial markets.