From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
What really is risky?! In many ways I think it's actually much safer to take things into your own hands rather than trusting your destiny to an uncertain jobs market.
However, imagine living in a place where such financial avenues are virtually non-existent. Where hard work and ambition offer no promise of progress or escape from economic stagnation. This reality is stark for many.
The monetary union was flawed from inception. It included, under the framework of a single currency and a single monetary policy, countries that were likely to have very divergent outcomes and therefore would prefer to see different exchange rates, interest rates, and monetary policy responses.
We should not assume that there is one single benchmark for all types of financial transactions. There are certain transactions that should be based on market rates, and others which call for the kind of benchmark that LIBOR provides.
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.
Our philosophy has been about trying to control the entire customer experience. A lot of people, when they think about branding, they think about advertising and marketing. But we actually don't do any advertising or marketing. Instead, we invest all of that money into the customer experience, and then our customers do our marketing for us through word of mouth.
The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.
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.
Men are cheaper than shingles.
The truth is nobody needs a diamond. You don't need a diamond to heat your home, run your car or power your cell-phone. As a business, it's clear to us that there is only one source of value for diamonds- and that is the consumer's desire for the product.
It turns out that for every ipod sold by Apple, it makes the US trade deficit go up by USD 150. Is the US poorer because the world loves ipods? No, we accrue the high-value elements like intellectual property, profit, and so forth, and outsource the lower-value parts of the chain.
The actual actions of the people in the market are the things that determine what happens next within the market.