Manu Joseph: “People are losing friends they have loved for decades. They are losing them over opinions. There was a time, not long ago, when very few people had any ideology. In fact, only elderly men had ideology, and there was a term for them. It was not ‘uncles.’ It was ‘ideologues.’ Nobody uses that word anymore because now we know that to be an ideologue is in the nature of our whole species. And it appears no one can hide their ideology anymore. As a result, across the nation, especially in the educated middle-class, people have been losing friends.”
Ruchir Sharma: “Polls show that voters in advanced economies are losing faith that the modern capitalist system can generate opportunities for everyone, and are increasingly inclined to believe that “people can only get rich at the expense of others”. Most see themselves as “others”. In 2023, the number of people who expect to be “better off in five years” hit record lows below 50 per cent in all 14 of the developed countries surveyed by the Edelman Trust Barometer. Optimists were a minority everywhere. Even the positive vibes emanating from a rising stock market aren’t cheering people outside the financial world. This bodes ill for incumbents, with national elections in many of the leading democracies this year. As recently as the early 2000s, incumbents were winning 70 per cent of their re-election bids; lately they have won just 30 per cent. To restore their traditional advantage, incumbents need to recognise that the connection between headline economic data and political support has broken. Voters are reacting to long-term decline, and are looking for fresh fixes.”
Peter Oppenheimer: “While the major central banks may cut interest rates this year, these are not likely to fall back to the lows of the post-financial crisis era or trend downwards over several years. Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions are rising, globalisation is being challenged and a more regionalised pattern of production is emerging. Tighter labour and energy markets are putting upward pressure on company costs, lowering margins. These headwinds are building as we face the twin impact of two powerful additional forces: AI and decarbonisation. Both will be capital-intensive and will present challenges as well as opportunities. In time, AI will probably boost productivity, create new jobs, products and services, while a decarbonised economy offers the prospect of a healthier and safer world, and one in which the marginal cost of energy collapses. Investors will need to be more patient as well as more willing to make bigger, more difficult choices between relative winners and losers.”
Moshik Temkin, author of Warriors, Rebels, and Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X : “I think people are really interested in leadership. They’re interested in the leaders that they have and in their own potential leadership. They’re interested in understanding leadership. But we tend to think about leaders as individuals primarily—people who made history, who changed the world. That is certainly true and very important. But I wanted to also show what really comes up a lot in my classroom. We can’t understand very transformative, important leaders without understanding the history that shaped them, the world in which they came up, and the crises that they faced. It’s more of a question that never has a clear answer. For every important leader that you look at, you’ll find that a leader is made, or shaped, by history and the circumstances that leader faces. This is also very important: leaders change things, and they create transformation that makes the world different. They, in turn, make history. So the book is an attempt to not definitely answer the question, because I don’t think it has an answer, but to really capture how that question teaches us a lot about leadership itself.”
FT: “If democracies are to survive and flourish, they need to believe in the future. The prospect of brighter times ahead — that the problems of today can be solved in the elections of tomorrow — have been one of the key underpinnings of modern democratic systems. But what if that claim no longer holds? What if, say, you believe that an immediate crisis or issue is so pressing — climate change, for example — that the promise that things will work out in the long run no longer rings true? This is the alarming scenario raised by Jonathan White in his book on how the most technologically advanced democracies are losing their faith in the future — creating a crisis that our established democratic politics cannot possibly resolve. Put another way: can democracy survive in the world where protesting high-school students say “I don’t understand why I should be in school if the world is burning”?”