Francis Fukuyama on the long arc of historical progress: “A democratic world order is not the inexorable outcome of historical forces, but even amid setbacks, societies are clearly evolving toward equality and individual freedom.”
WSJ: “America needs a return to first principles…How to revive U.S. vitality and confidence? Economists John Cogan and Kevin Warsh offer a way to think about what made the country prosperous. Pay attention to the ‘three I’s’—ideas, individuals and institutions…“Over the last 30 years,” he says, “we’ve become less and less confident that our system is the right system. It does seem to me that more emphasis has been placed on the weaknesses of America than upon its strengths.” Yet both men see the country as hungry for a return to its “natural liberty.” The U.S., they write, can again become a “beacon to the world” if its leaders “choose to empower the individual, encourage the development . . . of new ideas, and ensure the fidelity of institutions to their mission.””
Jaspreet Bindra: “DeFi is the financial system of the Web3 world. It substitutes biased human intermediaries with trust-building technologies like blockchain and open-source software. It makes transactions cheaper and helps more than intermediaries profit. It is almost instantaneous, with T+3 settlements a thing of the past, and much more transparent. Importantly, it is a democratizing force that empowers the end user to do things that only powerful intermediaries could. It has the potential to spread banking to hundreds of millions of the world’s unbanked.”
