From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
People are now talking of a new 'Cold War' with China. This is a very misleading use of history. If you look at the relationship between China and the US today, there is half a trillion dollars of trade, and some 350,000 Chinese students and 3 million Chinese tourists are in the US. It's more complex than the Cold War.
To my mind, the essence of capitalism is that decentralised economic decisions can be taken in firms that compete against each other in structured markets, and do so under strong incentives for growth and the increase of productivity. It's the only system we've ever hit-on that appears to be capable of driving mass prosperity.
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.
My greatest fear is that we have learnt nothing. Individually, we have learnt that the longer your population lives healthy, the better off your economy will be.
For businesses to survive, let alone brands, you need a secure and stable base. You need secure economic and social conditions to reduce risk.
If corporate profits are high, it suggests performance has been terrific… you can't then complain that governance is broken! You can't have it both ways…. if corporate governance was better, profits would be even higher!
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.
My own twist on that is that the bigger they come, the exponentially harder they fall! Banks are so bent at using expanded balance sheets, using derivatives, pretending that risk is in the net when it's really in the gross, pretending that risk is a linear function of scale when it's an exponential function of scale.
I use the word repugnance to describe transactions that some people would like to engage in, that other people would not like them to; it's often hard to pin-down what harm the transaction does to anyone else.
If you're going to be a city of love and compassion, you're going to have to develop economics infrastructure, capital planning and job creation policies, complementing them with education. For those who feel left out, we have to bring them in, and have that conversation with every company, every worker, and fight for them to be part of the more complicated world.
America has a class system, and it's becoming more rigid all the time. As inequality widens the ladder becomes so long that you have little hope of getting too far up it in your lifetime.
We're moving towards a world of increasing abundance. The poorest and wealthiest can access the same information because of Google; the same information Larry Page has! That same democratisation and demonetisation will occur in other critically important areas of our life.