From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
GDP only catches a slice of the value that we value. It captures what goes on in the market, the financial value of goods and services sold in an economy over a year. We need to get away from the narrow, monetary, measure of GDP which asserts that economic value is the only thing we care about.
Markets are good at things that have prices, but certain things cannot have prices. Whenever you have situations where you can't have prices, it's not a question of a missing market, it's that you cannot fundamentally construct this market, and this is when government intervention is required.
If you look at the balance sheets of Fortune 500 companies 50 years ago and today, you can see that 50 years ago, 80% of the value was physical stuff. Today, more than 85% of the value consists of intangibles. Companies must become so much more now that their value comes from their ability to inspire, drive and organise human beings.
We can now, more accurately than ever before, view the transactions occurring within our system, identifying the originator(s), beneficiary(ies) and intermediaries along the chain.
Let's not forget that currencies today are based on good will not gold reserves.
I would suggest that most dollar problems are cyclical, and when the fed reserve raises interest rates, and the business cycle re-enters an upswing, there will be many reasons to buy dollar.
The potential of wearable health monitoring is enormous, and under appreciated by a lot of society, because version-1 of wearables were – to put it politely – underwhelming. The health care industry spends a lot on curative costs… and if you shift the curative to the preventative, you can save a tonne of money and have better outcomes.
It's clear to me that small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years… particularly through the recession.
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.
People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.
In rich countries, 'innovation' often means finding a better way of doing things. But in developing countries, it can mean finding a way to do things at all.
The most common misunderstanding is that the Arctic is just a frozen wilderness with a lot of ice and glaciers and a few polar bears roaming. On the contrary the Arctic is a very diverse part of our planet with multiple resources and economic opportunities, the home for over four million people of different nationalities and diverse ethnic origin.