From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
As a collective, we tend to look at progress as being linear, especially where it concerns women's rights. This is a huge mistake and breeds complacency because we risk losing the hard-won gains.
The economy is in the doldrums and likely to worsen. The UK economy has performed worse than most Euro Zone countries, and the calls for a change, of course, are becoming pretty loud. The economists who backed Osborne in 2010 have basically withdrawn their support, the IMF lowered its growth forecast and so on. The government's economic strategy is clearly in disarray.
The complexity of the topic combined with significant political and social blindness towards it, has led to disability becoming one of the most significant un-addressed issues of modern time.
People have lost their belief in the establishment, they believe that the outsider who would bring anger and chaos is much better than the status quo; even if that is against their own interests.
We have relatively small groups like Al Qaeda, The Taliban and the Islamic State who are capable of challenging the mightiest and most advanced militaries of the world.
Sometimes it's hard to shake the feeling that we are slipping backwards, but I'm an optimist at heart. We have a long way to go, but if history has taught us anything, it's that women rarely win anything without a fight!
We have enough water on this planet for everyone's needs, but not for everyone's greed. The crisis is fundamentally about distribution, access, and governance - not absolute scarcity.
The politics of identity has gone very wrong in many cases. Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual. A Muslim man from Somalia, who is a chess player, may have his chess-playing as his main source of identity, for example.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase freedoms… just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph and the telephone did before.
The modifications are not expected to lead to tighter financial conditions for households and businesses and do not signal any change in the outlook for the economy or for monetary policy.
Fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
When countries integrate themselves, they provide 'favours' resulting in wider and better opportunities for all and similarly, borrowers can tap the world pool of savings and they are supposed to benefit from that. That is the theory, though empirically, there is little evidence of these effects.