From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
No more throwing any old garbage into the Tier 1 bucket and calling it capital: the new standards for common equity are significantly tougher than the old standards for Tier 1 capital in total.
World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed. I describe it as the mystery of growth, namely what generated this dramatic transformation in the standard of living over the past 200 years after literally 300,000 years of stagnation?
We are living through a profound era where speculative failure is simply not an option, and is fought tooth and nail by the government. This is a trap. Here I am the fool looking to fail frequently.
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.
For the societies themselves, this activity drains hard currency reserves, heightens inflation, reduces tax collection, curtails government service and undermines investment. There is no good accomplished by this massive outflow of resources.
BitCoin might not be the final model but it is definitely here to stay. Many have criticized BitCoin because it enables illegal transactions. I think the critique is lame. Did you know that 75% of the value of all U.S. cash is in $100 bills? Cash is the problem.
This is an ultra-competitive category, and that means that there's real value being created. If nobody shows up to the party, it's probably not a great party. When it comes to staying competitive, I've always focused on the customer and worked backwards from there.
With participatory culture, economics dictates that we pour more resources into building an infrastructure platform that anyone can use, so most resources go into empowering 'the long tail'. Small groups of people can come together and make use of a powerful infrastructure to enable them to pursue their own passions and interests, without regard for popularity.
The high debt ratios also masked the zombie households, zombie corporates, zombie businesses, zombie banks, zombie shadow banks, zombie governments and zombie countries. They never went bankrupt.
We're working at the nexus of two pretty powerful forces which, when combined, can have a profound impact on reducing global poverty. First, agriculture.... You've got around 2.6 billion people in the world who survive on less than $2 per day, 75% of them are rural and agriculture is their primary economic activity.
The standard models were formulated through a process that started well before computers were in place, and I would say it's undergone a certain lock-in. Once you start going down that path, it's hard to break out of it to another path. As a result, economics is stuck.
$1.8 trillion a year is spent subsidizing industries that harm us, predominantly fossil fuels. Redirecting a significant portion of these funds could dramatically accelerate our transition.