From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We are, in the early days of the 21st century, talking about the death of the living world as an environmental externality. That alone should be an alarm-bell that our framework doesn't serve our time.
Globally, we have neglected this topic [agriculture] for decades. We have, worldwide, over a billion undernourished people. Food prices have risen over the past few years, with our own research showing these should accelerate up from 2010.
Here I am the fool looking to fail frequently. I want to either hit a homerun or walk or even strike out. This means I fail far more often than I succeed. But the important point is that what I lose when I fail is trivial, epsilon compared to what I make when I succeed.
To be a billionaire in America today is less a matter of merit than it is a matter of being at the right place at the right time, and being a beneficiary of a set of rules designed to benefit billionaires.
When individual countries hit a crisis, they've got 2 options, they can either look after themselves (at the cost of their neighbours) or they can create rules which they (and everyone else) will abide by, which requires institutions.
We have made money, capital, materialism and consumption into our God, it's a disease – you could call it affluenza. It is perhaps because of this context that humanity has lost its way, and the consideration of human rights has been subordinated to the interests of a handful of powerful people who sit at the top of the pyramid.
The real scarcity today is attention to the importance of the question, to what end are we deploying this capital. The knowledge age economy is aspirational and that is where I believe we should aim for as we are clearly not there yet. We are in a limbo now, an interregnum phase and this is when everything is particularly unsettling.
Much jitteriness in this recent crisis has come down to 'flying blind' – where investors and risk managers have been caught somewhat unaware, and do not have the visibility to make decisions with support.
For businesses to survive, let alone brands, you need a secure and stable base. You need secure economic and social conditions to reduce risk.
These new regulations should (in theory, although there is no research to test it) prevent this psychological risk aversion by ensuring that all counterparties know that at a wholesale and institutional level, they are safe.
One major overhead entrepreneurial business often grapple with is the exorbitant rent in cities. Moving to a smaller town offers a significant reduction in these costs and promotes regional economic balance.
There are two key features of blockchain that make it, potentially, a very useful technology from an economic perspective. First, the data about transactions are posted on many public sites thus giving these data an immutability that makes disputes easy to avoid. Second, although the data are in some sense public, they can be encrypted so that a particular party learns only those aspects that she needs to know.