From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Many entrepreneurs are deluded about their odds of success, that evidence is very clear. This creates problems… Should a government subsidise entrepreneurs who greatly over-estimate their chances of success?
Economies are built on free flow of capital within the market, which drives trade. Business and individuals need debt (finance) to invest, develop, trade and grow. This is a fundamental truth of how markets operate.
The result would be immediately one of the greatest catastrophes since World War II. Hundreds of thousands would die. It would cause trillions of dollars of immediate economic damage as buildings were vaporised. The real damage, though, would come in the days and weeks after, when there would undoubtedly be a global panic.
Changing the mood has an economic impact superior to many measures because companies and families, when they have more confidence, they act differently. Uncertainty and fear are enemies of economic growth.
Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
With participatory culture, economics dictates that we pour more resources into building an infrastructure platform that anyone can use, so most resources go into empowering 'the long tail'. Small groups of people can come together and make use of a powerful infrastructure to enable them to pursue their own passions and interests, without regard for popularity.
When global markets open up, if you're selling t-shirts in the US or Denmark, you're disadvantaged because countries like Bangladesh produce them more efficiently and cheaply. This has fuelled arguments advocating caution when it comes to free trade. We've conducted what is, to my knowledge, the first study attempting to quantify both the benefits and costs of trade, rather than focusing solely on the benefits.
Despite these needs, the reality is that more than half of the estimated 2.7 billion working age adults globally are excluded from formal financial services. Poor families, as far as access to financial services is concerned, are doubly penalised. They need financial access more than we do, but they only have access to inferior informal services.
We are living in a world where the top 1% of the world's population own more of our planet's wealth than the bottom 95% combined. We live in a world where billions exist in abject poverty without access to the basic food, water, shelter which the rest of us take for granted.
It's really complicated to work-out how much of our wealth came from empire, it's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake. It's better to look at individual wealth and businesses.
Early stage investing is very difficult and financially risky meaning that a lot of what we invest in won't work. A lot of what we do is, in effect, pilots to see if individual projects or funds can generate some positive return.
However much we would like to pursue a 'be kind' policy, we have to recognize that there are others in the world who are going to eat our lunch if we don't do our best.