We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.
Noreena Hertz
From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense.
All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.
All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous.
So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.
The World Trade Organization is an organization that defends trade interests. I think the problem is less that they exist. The problem is that internationally we've only got an organization that protects trade interests. Surely we need some kind of counterweight to protect human rights and the environment, too.
Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference.
Transparency, accountability and sustainability have become the slogans of the market leaders. Companies carry out environmental and social audits to court the consumer, and even the bluest chips woo organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty.
Experience is not the poor relation of expertise. Valuable insights in business often come from the people on the ground.
Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.
We must embrace a new agenda based on inclusiveness; a commitment to reconnecting the social and the economic; a relinking of the latter to a plausible redistributive system; and a determination to ensure that everyone has access to justice. All these things are within our reach.
At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.
I'm really looking at questions of power, navigation, and spin. Then I am also looking for real-world stories that give me greater insight into smart and new ways of thinking.
I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I'm trying to be more mindful of that.
The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.
In an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.
We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers' irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.
Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism gives greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest that favours the middle classes, an outpouring of the dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie.
Child labour may be distasteful to westerners, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of third world children? Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest.
I've become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future.
We need to have much clearer regulations on things like corporate funding of scientific research. Things need to be made explicit which are implicit.
It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush's environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies.
What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.
As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions - prime ministers, presidents and chief executives - and so I'm all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere.
I grew up in a highly political home. My mother was the co-chair of the 300 Group, an organisation whose aim was to get more women MPs into parliament, and she herself stood in the 1987 election, the year before she died.
My parents were entrepreneurs. I grew up believing in the power of innovation.
Most organisations do not actively seek out input from their lower echelons.
We need to know how we are feeling. Mindfully acknowledging our feelings serves as an 'emotional thermostat' that recalibrates our decision making. It's not that we can't be anxious, it's that we need to acknowledge to ourselves that we are.
I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.
Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that's something we need to change - especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import.
I really believe in a globalist agenda, but globalization isn't just allowing companies to trade freely all over the world. It's about what types of rights and responsibilities come with that.
If somebody tweets 'I like Coca-Cola,' does that mean that they're actually going to buy Coca-Cola? One can? Two cans? Three cans? If they retweet someone else's Tweet, does that mean they're going to buy it?
Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.
My parents decided - because they were not going to teach us anything Jewish at home - to send both me and my sister to a Jewish primary school. So I went to Kerem Primary School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. But, for me, that school really didn't work that well.
Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn't being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people.
I grew up in a home where I was literally told from a young age, 'No daughter of mine will ever wash a man's socks,' and I am pleased to say I never have. It was made clear that whatever I wanted to do I should aspire to, regardless of my gender.
Employees speak of being fearful opening emails and feeling increasingly helpless in the face of the deluge. Physiologically, we now know that the state of continuous disruption puts us into a constant state of hormone-induced stress.
It's not that I am against the rich giving money to charities. I'm all for it, and we should think of ways of encouraging more of it. But I also believe that states, rather than individuals, are ultimately a better bet for delivering a fair and just world and reconciling differing interests.
When Apple introduced its game-changing iPhone in 2007, Nokia was caught sleeping on the job. Although it had actually developed an iPhone-style device - complete with a color touchscreen, maps, online shopping, the lot - some seven years earlier. Astonishingly, it never released the product.
With clothing being designed that allows you to be hugged virtually, video conferencing becoming ever sharper, and our social and romantic lives increasingly taking place online, the gap between the physical and the virtual is getting ever smaller.
My mother was really involved with the Refusenik campaign with Soviet Union Jews. They would come and stay at our house, some of them, after they managed to get out of the Soviet Union at the time. There were things that were Jewish-related happening in my house quite consistently, but it was much more from a kind of activist standpoint.
The term 'glass ceiling' was coined in 1984. More than 20 years later, the ceiling has barely cracked. There isn't a single country in the world that has as many female as male politicians. In business, the situation is even worse. Its highest echelon - the board - remains a chauvinist's dream.
Goodwill and reputation are intangibles, but they are the keys to business success. Since they are also inexorably linked to social values, it follows that a change in social norms will have a significant impact on profits.
Without industry, finance and government consciously and collaboratively ensuring that capital flows to where it is needed in order to ensure the scaling up of climate change solutions, whatever deal is agreed risks never being realised.
Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.
Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
We are beginning to see a fundamental outrage at the whole interconnected mess of a system: at energy companies who record massive profits, yet allow pensioners to struggle to stay warm in winter; at CEOs who can earn up to a 1,000 times the salary of their average worker; and soon, any day now, at those politicians who allowed this to happen.
Terrorism and trade cannot be the only issues on which the world unites. We must commit ourselves to a global coalition to deal with exclusion, too.
Consumers, unlike voters, expect an immediate response to their concerns; and companies, unlike governments, do not have the luxury of a mid-term lull.
I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.
