Wisdom in fragments

I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right. Perhaps I should be even more excited about being wrong, because if I am always proving myself right, I'm just affirming my beliefs and not evolving them… and that's not learning at all, is it?

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

Any time you get angry, frustrated or disappointed, it's worth remembering that those emotions are just a first draft. You would never publish a draft version of your blog, right? The same is true of emotion- a lot of people just go ahead and 'publish' – internalising how they feel – without stopping for a second and thinking that maybe they ought to do a revision.

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

Cryptocurrencies follow a 3–4-year cycle that seems to repeat. We have 'crypto winter' which is when media interest is generally low, then sudden price rises that bring attention and cascading hype. I don't think of cryptocurrencies on the whole as being a bubble, but rather that they are bubbly-terrain depending on where we are in the cycle.

We are seeing the emergence, development and evolution of entire monetary systems live, unfolding before our eyes. You have Bitcoin and Ethereum and can imagine them as international monetary systems that bring-together local ecosystems. We used to have gold as a key reserve asset, and now it's the US dollar.

The potential for blockchain is to accelerate the digitization of financial markets. Blockchain gets everyone excited as it has the potential to convene these different parties together to reach the necessary agreements, in that sense it is a unique enabler, a coordination mechanism. That has massive implications on the structure of our financial markets.

Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer

I should say right away that I am very much a cryptocurrency sceptic. My judgement is that the dangers of cryptocurrencies do not outweigh the benefits. Cryptocurrency can interfere with governments' ability to fight recessions with monetary policy. When people are using privately created money rather than ordinary money, the money supply is beyond the government's control, and monetary policy can no longer be conducted.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer

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.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer

We believed, and took on board the promise of growth, that it would even things up again, that it would clean up after itself, and that actually was a panacea to many of our economic ills. Yet, all the evidence has shown us that growth does not even things up- some of the richest countries in the world are becoming immensely unequal and we have seen that growth certainly doesn't clean-up after itself.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

The economy is a subset of society, it's a social construct. It's entirely created by humanity- by the way we interact with one another to meet our wants and needs and human society itself is embedded in the living world, we are part of nature whether we like it or not- and we have to respect the rest of nature.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

What's unnerving is that when students learn about this character (rational economic man), over time they begin to value self-interest and competition over altruism and collaboration. These models are performative. When we say rational economic man, we become more like him. Who we tell ourselves we are, shapes who we become…

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

Economics depicts humanity as a character called rational, economic man. I'd say he has to be a man- he has no dependants. He's a man standing alone with money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head and nature at his feet. When we show-up, we're told that we're competitive and self-interested, the traits of the market.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

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. In the boxing match between free market laissez-faire capitalists and state loving socialists the economic debate ignored the household – which is expected to provide the food, do the cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping, education, look after the sick and elderly, yet is completely missing from GDP.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

Until the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy had been measured in tonnes of grain and steel, and because of the crash- economists and politicians decided they wanted some grip over the scale of output of the economy- so they turned to a brilliant young scientist called Simon Kuznets and asked him how they should be measuring economic output. His answer was published in 1930s- he figured out a way to add-up all the tonnes of grains and steel and create a national income figure. He gave the caveat that it would scarcely be taken as the measure of welfare of a nation because it didn't include all the value created in a community, all the unpaid caring work at home, and only measured what was sold- not what was used-up!

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

We don't always see change and activism from the perspective of what we're giving, it's too often about taking things away… Don't eat that… don't do that… don't drive that car… we have to reframe and rethink. Imagine if we told people we could give them the universe back, it's a beautiful gift- but also allows us to save energy, birds, insects and more.

Canadian science broadcaster and host of Discovery Channel's Daily Planet

We have turned life into a business model- and have somewhat forgotten the reciprocity we have with nature rather; we just see it as a resource. We have maintained societies for thousands of years based on a reciprocal relationship with nature, and we need to get back to that and need to have respect for our fellow earthlings rather than seeing them as products.

Canadian science broadcaster and host of Discovery Channel's Daily Planet